The Invisible Library

You can’t see him, but Rupert is just out of frame, sneeking up behind Lucy. She’s wise to his moves, though. She is six, after all and he’s a mere child of ten months.

Despite making a Gazillion dollars, Superman Returns is apparently considered a flop. This is due mainly to the fact that it cost over 500 Bajillion dollars to make and market.

Warren Ellis sums it up:

SUPERMAN RETURNS conservatively cost $250 million to make. Probably the same again to promote. It took $21M this weekend, eaten alive by PIRATES. The studio gets about half the box office takings. In America, WB’s cumulative slice of SR’s takings amount to around $50M.

As Fraction said to me Sat night, producer Jon Peters is probably sleeping with a gun in his mouth.

Is it conceivable that something that took fifty-odd million in its first weekend could be a flop? I said of KING KONG that for that film’s budget, I could grow my own giant fucking monkey. $250 million puts you in spacelaunch-budget territory. For $250 million WB could’ve given Bryan Singer his own communications satellite and spent the change on a George Clooney movie. Or two Wes Anderson movies. It’s an astonishing volume of cash that, at this stage, they don’t have a prayer of making back worldwide or on DVD.

This is the absurdity of modern Hollywood; that taking more than the GNP of Luxembourg in a single weekend is not actually enough to put a movie in the black.

Maybe Hollywood should try things the Werner Herzog Way:

In Werner Herzog’s films, the main characters tend to be ambitious explorers who find themselves crashing in spectacular failure. Aguirre, the Wrath of God follows a 16th-century conquistador who sets out to find El Dorado, only to end up on a raft, demented and alone, adrift on a stagnant river. In the documentary Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell becomes so adept at cohabiting with wild grizzly bears that he comes to believe he’s one of them – until he gets eaten.

Now the maverick German director, who has made 52 films over a 44-year career, is launching The Wild Blue Yonder. The movie, which he describes as “science fiction fantasy,” tells the story of two interstellar voyages. The first is undertaken by an alien race fleeing a dying planet with hopes of colonizing Earth, the other by human astronauts who set out to explore the liquid world the aliens left behind.

Instead of spending millions on Spielberg-style effects, Herzog went low tech and high geek. He spliced together documentary footage from NASA and the National Science Foundation’s US Antarctic Program. He created “characters” from documentary-style scenes with actual physicists and astronauts. But this being a Herzog film, the lyrical images are tempered by characteristic pessimism. “The film ends our illusions about intergalactic travel,” Herzog says bluntly. “We will not do it. We cannot manage it. It’s just too far.”

To the Kind Reader who signed me up to the National Council of Churches Newsletter: I understand that not everyone who goes to church is a twitterpated bigot. I’ve known that for quite some time. And while Liberal Christians aren’t quite as mythical as Unicorns (or Jesus) you certainly aren’t going out of their way to get noticed. Oh but Al Sharpton was on the Daily Show a few years back! Yeah. And Pat Robertson has his own freakin channel.

Look, liberal Christians, the scary truth you aren’t admitting to yourself— wait, scratch that— one of the scary truths you aren’t admitting to yourself, is that the rise to power of the Chowder-headed, drooling Fundy is your own God Damned fault. They’re your people. They go to your church, or the one on the next block. They sit at your Good Friday Pancake Suppers and Fourth of July cookouts and jabber on about how Bill O’Reilly makes some sense and you say nothing. You do nothing. You’ve sat there for the last six years, meekly pointing at Uncle Pat as he wipes his mouth on the tablecloth, insults my wife’s heritage and sugests an after dinner “Turkey Shoot” and quietly mouth, “I’m not with him!” Then you get in his car and let him drive you home.

Both Liberal Christians and the kill ‘em all Christians in the GOP are from the same family. You both believe in myths that aren’t even remotely true. Only they actually believe in them all the time while you only pretend to believe in them for an hour every Sunday and two hours on Christmas Eve. They spout off about the Rapture and End Of Days and them Dern Mexicans and you look at us Secular Humanists and expect us to correct their lunatic behavior and call them on their bad theology and antediluvian social habits. You want me to be the bad guy, so you won’t have to deal with the uncomfortable silences and awkward coffee socials.

Well, tough shit. That Racist Douche Bag with the Christian fish magnet on the back of his SUV is your Crazy Uncle, not mine. If you want Atheists to respect your beliefs, you should have taken care of your family shit at home, before it got messy in public.

Now, to the person who signed me up to the newsletter. You could have started a dialogue in comments. You could have sent me an email. But instead, you took the same passive-agressive route that’s caused this whole mess in the first place, which is cowardly and lame.

Now that my supervisors are perusing this blog, I thought I’d give them something fun to read that also provides genuine insight into my personality (lest they think I’m just a disgruntled atheist with an overwrought fondness for cats). So here are my top five favorite albums (in no particular order):

1. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel.
   For the last few years, Elvira and I have treated CDs as nothing more than transportation devices for MP3s, allowing us to add more, more, more! to our Massive Music Collection (as I write this, I’m importing the new Frank Black double album which, when complete, will put us at 12,497 songs.) But In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is one of the few CDs I’ll pul out and listen to as an album because it’s the best way to hear it. All the songs flow into each other, telling one long, surreal story involving decay, reincarnation and talking smack about Jesus. Bonus!
2. Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, The Flaming Lips.
   It’s a screaming, mad, lamenting rock album about pink robots and life on Mars. What’s not to love? It’s also a solidly fun album. There’s not a track on here that I don’t enjoy, even part II of the title track, which is just a girl screaming over synthpop noise and drums. It’s what john Cage would have done if he had attempted something even remotely enjoyable.
3. Doolittle, The Pixies.
   This is the album that Nirvana wanted to make with Nevermind but couldn’t because Curt Cobain was a no-talent junkie. Even if you’ve never heard of the Pixies, I gguarantee you’ve heard at least three songs from this album and if you have heard of the Pixies, you know why: songs about, “Biblical rape and torture, death, deprivation, […], both the spooning and slicing of human eyeballs.” and monkeys. Let’s not forget the monkeys. I heard them play last year and it was quite possibly the second greatest concert I’ve ever been to.
4. The best concert I’ve ever been to was Wilco. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is my favorite album of theirs, probably because it was the first I heard and the one that blew me away. But they’re all good. I could gush abut this album for a thousand words, but I don’t need to. Just listen to it and you’ll agree: you can’t be totally human until you’ve heard this album. it’s Shakespeare with a blues guitar and weird, haunted radio sounds.
5. 69 Love Songs, The Magnetic Fields.
   See, I am a softy, really. A whole album about love songs (technically, three whole albums). Happy, sad, poppy little ditties about love and all the tragic beauty it creates, from revolutions to obsessive compulsions and even bad jazz. Actually, I suspect it’s a complex treatise on the nature of love and that all 69 songs played in a certain sequence will bring romantic enlightenment. Or just get you off, one or the other.

We were in Raleigh most of last week, visiting friends with a four year old so, of course I come home with a kid kontamination. Head full of cotton. Blogging will resume shortly.

Your Author at the Lincoln Memorial back in March

I know it isn’t easy right now to have super-patriotic thoughts about our country, what with tales of Haditha the like but we need to try to be happy and remember that the monument there means more than just American supremacy, greed, gluttony and disinterist in the affairs of others but stands for ideas like Liberty and Justice for all.

Elvira and I are going on vacation for a week, so no bloggy til the 11th or so. feel free to peruse the archives though, or check out the regular reads over there on the sidebar, like Bryan’s place, or the other members of the LC.

As is probably to be expected, some Freepers are claiming Superman as their own, and all us Liberals can keep our dirty, sex having hands off. But is Superman a conservative crusader? Well, not likely. For one thing, his creators, Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster were two good Jewish Kids from New York City. And as we all know, nothing Conservative comes out of New york City. For another, Superman stared out fighting Evil Capitalists. Crooked mine owners. Slum lords. Anyone who was trying to pull one over on the common working man. He was a Depression-era hero for the people, and a bit of a malcontent as well. he didn’t become a boyscout or start fighting super-villains until well after WWII started.

As for the claims that Superman is just a thinly veiled Christ-figure, well, yes and no. While there may be a few similar details to the myth of Jesus, Superman’s story shares quite a few of the basic Savior Myth Archetypes:

A culture hero is a mythological hero specific to some group (cultural, ethnic, racial, religious, etc.) who changes the world through invention or discovery. A typical culture hero might be credited as the discoverer of fire, or agriculture, songs, tradition and religion, and is usually the most important legendary figure of a people, sometimes as the founder of its ruling dynasty. The hero is sometimes said to be still living, but is often instead a star, constellation or purely spiritual in nature

In fact, Superman actually has more in common with Herakles than any other Hero. The comparison to Jesus gets even thinner with the new movie, flirting dangerously close to Da Vinnci Code territory, if you try and follow that train of thought out literally (we can talk more about this in comments, you spoil sports).

So, I’m not buying Superman as ass whoopin Jesus, fighting for the rights of unborn fetuses, one Nation, Under Oil Companies, for just the rich and no one else. If you Freepers want to write that story, you’ll have to steal some lesser-know hero to do it.

Alas, they lost to Portugal in penalty kicks.