MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

Stan Lee is gone, and even if I wasn’t late to the game, I don’t know what I could say that hasn't already been said.

My own experience is similar to others of my generation – by the time I started reading superhero comics, Stan Lee wasn’t writing so much anymore, and pretty much all of his creations had been taken over by other writers. But I knew who Stan Lee was via the Marvel editorial pages – “Stan’s Soapbox”, et cetera – and I was aware that he was the guy who had thought up these characters. I wasn’t a fan of all of them, but I did like Spiderman, the Hulk and X-Men, among others.

I’m pretty sure it’s no coincidence that these were the characters that seemed to struggle with an inability to fit into society for various reasons. A lot has been written about how Stan’s greatest contribution to comics was adding a layer of human complexity to the Marvel universe – just because you have superpowers doesn’t mean people will like you or your life will be better. I don’t know if I consciously thought of that while reading Spiderman or Hulk, but it was definitely core to the X-Men comics.

Obviously, not everything he did was great (Nightcat comes to mind – and that Backstreet Boys cartoon). On the other hand, I admired his ability to come up with character ideas almost on the fly – many wouldn't work, but his ethos seemed to be that no idea is too outrageous or outlandish, because who knows, it might actually work.

So yeah, I think he’s earned his rep as one of the greatest visionaries of comics.

To be sure, he had his critics. Which brings me to Bill Maher and his silly op-ed about how it’s somehow Stan Lee’s fault that Trump is president because comic books make you stupid. Or something.

I can’t add much to what Neil Gaiman has already said in one tweet – Maher is clearly trolling with a very old argument that anti-comics people have used for decades, so his argument is not only invalid, it's not even original.

Also, it’s hard to take Maher (who presumably only reads intellectual books) seriously when he goes around claiming that vaccines cause autism.

And so much for Bill Maher.

Nuff said,

This is dF

Art Bell is gone, which means finally he may finally find the answers he was looking for.

If you don’t know, Bell was the late-night talk radio host of Coast To Coast AM, in which he and his guests and callers explored UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot, various supernatural and paranormal phenomena, and government cover-ups of all the above. Bell was X Files before X Files was cool.

When I worked at a news-talk radio station in the mid-90s, we ran the first couple of hours of his show before sign-off. And having grown up at a time when some of the big best sellers were written by Erich von Daniken, Charles Berlitz and Hal Lindsey – and where TV was running programs like Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Project UFO – I had a soft spot for Bell’s subject matter. Granted I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but I admit I'm fascinated with the theories themselves. And frankly, compared to the political shows we ran in the afternoon, Bell was by far the sanest person in our line-up.

The secret, I think, was that he was very open minded and willing to let callers talk about all kinds of weird things, but he also knew when to reign them in or push back when even their own internal logic started to unravel. He could generally tell when people really believed what they were saying and when they were making it up as they went along, and he wasn’t afraid to call them out on it – yet he did it in a calm and reasonable way. He didn’t yell at or insult anyone – at least not while I was listening. Maybe he did in later years, but from what I understand he had the same style from beginning to end.

Which isn’t to say that everything he said was true. But he could at least make it sound plausible, more often than not.

Of course, some people blame Bell for not only convincing people that conspiracy theories and UFOs are real, but laying the groundwork for people like Alex Jones and the alt-right. Personally I don’t think that’s accurate or fair. People believed in UFOs and govt conspiracy theories long before Bell picked up a microphone. He gave them a voice and a platform, but the internet would have done that eventually anyway.

And in any case, conspiracy-theory radio really has its roots in the rise of rabid conservative talk shows in the early 90s. If you want to pin Alex Jones and alt-right batshit fact-free outrage radio on anyone, pin it on Rush Limbaugh. He pretty much invented both the format and the business model.

By comparison, I think Bell was relatively harmless, both in terms of the subject matter and the way he handled it. Again, I only listened to him from the early 90s to 1996, so I don’t know what his latter-year broadcasts were like, but at least during that time, Bell wasn’t a loud angry demagogue out to exploit populist anger exclusively in favor of a specific political party. He was more like a radio version of Charles Fort, keen to explore the unknown and unexplained, and convinced that the world is weirder than we think and – to a coin a phrase – the truth is out there.

I want to believe,

This is dF

If you read science-fiction/fantasy, or know/follow people on social media who do, you know that Ursula K Le Guin is gone.

The fan tributes have been pouring in, illustrating clearly just how big a deal she was as a writer and how influential her writing has been on multiple levels. (Jo Walton has written a fine tribute on that score.)

Consequently, I don’t feel qualified to write a tribute because I’m pretty late to the Le Guin game.

I only started reading her work a little over three years ago – four years, if you include my aborted attempt to start with The Dispossessed. So not only am I late, I couldn’t even get through the first two chapters of one of her most acclaimed books before giving up on it.

And I don’t have an explanation for either. I’ve seen Le Guin’s name on the sci-fi racks of bookstores for as long as I can remember, but somehow I wasn’t inspired to pick them up. I don’t think it was because of her gender – I’ve never consciously avoided female writers, and there were several from the genre that I liked even back in the 80s.

Looking back, I suppose maybe it was because I had some specific ideas of what kind of SF/F I liked when I was a teenager, and Le Guin’s take on SF/F didn’t fit in that particular window. And once I was old enough to expand that window, it had actually expanded way beyond genre fiction – so much so that I stopped reading SF/F for a long time because I felt it was too narrow and I wasn’t getting anything out of it. In retrospect, it seems obvious that my mindset was a lot narrower than the genre was.

Similarly, when I tried The Dispossessed the first time, I wasn’t mentally prepared for it, even as I approached it as a reader with comparatively broader horizons. That happens sometimes – I’ll try an author for the first time and it won’t click for whatever reason. Then I’ll try again later and it’s magic – it’s like, “Okay, I get it now.”

In this case, it turned out to be The Left Hand Of Darkness that was my gateway to Le Guin’s vision, and it absolutely blew me away. Several Le Guin books later (all of which I liked), I tried The Dispossessed again and it blew me away too.

And so it goes.

Most of the tributes I’ve read mention her Earthsea books as her greatest (or at least most popular) work. Personally I like her SF books more, if only because fantasy is a genre I lost a taste for a long time ago, but the Earthsea books are also good (or at least the first three – I haven’t read the rest yet, but I intend to).

So there’s another testament to her talent – she actually made me enjoy books in a genre I’m not that into.

(Speaking of Earthsea, here’s a fun fact: The person who finally convinced me to try Le Guin was the priest of my church – he’s a big fan of the Earthsea books and has cited them in his sermons to make a point. The irony that Le Guin was a solid atheist is not lost on me.)

I haven’t read that that many of her books to make any kind of informed comment. But I will say that based on what I have read, perhaps her greatest talent was bringing something new to the table. She didn’t stick to the genre tropes, and more often than not used them mainly for lumber to build something different, or at least to say something worth saying.

So I don’t have any stories about her being an influence or an in-depth familiarity with her entire body of work. What I can say is that she was an extraordinarily gifted writer who wrote a couple of the best books I’ve ever read, and who has yet to disappoint me. And one good thing about getting started on her late is all the books I’m looking forward to reading now. I’ve already ordered copies of The Lathe Of Heaven and the first three novels of the Hainish cycle to start with.

Better late than never,

This is dF

As you know, Adam West is gone.

Like a lot of people, West was a pop culture icon of my childhood thanks to the syndication of Batman. And whatever his qualities as an actor, he was perfect for the role – too perfect, perhaps, although West was able to reconcile himself with it. And that’s good.

Also, like a lot of people, he was my first Batman experience – in my case, it was the TV show that led me to read the comic books, rather than the other way round. And of course there will always be debate about how “authentic” West’s Batman was – after all, the whole show was meant to be ironic camp fun for 60s hipsters who laughed at Batman’s ultra-square demeanor.

And yet it wasn’t. While the show was essentially conceived as a sort of superhero sitcom, they were serious about Batman’s squareness, if only because he was meant to be the sane centerpiece of an insane crooked world of flamboyant supervillains, and a counterpoint to Robin’s youthful impulsiveness to do what feels right vs what is right – even if it’s a detail like pedestrian safety or being too young to legally enter a nightclub.

Here’s one way of looking at it – college-age hipsters watched it in the 1960s and laughed at Batman’s goody-two-shoes squareness. Primary school kids in the 1970s like me watched the reruns and saw Batman as the ultimate role model – the guy who stands for justice, defends the defenseless, obeys rules and laws (apart from the ones against vigilantism, of course, but who thinks of that when yr eight?), and generally does the right thing for the Greater Good of society.

In other words, we didn't see the irony – we saw the superhero we thought Batman was supposed to be. And we aspired to that. As you do when yr a kid.

Of course we grew up, and in my case I did see the goofy, hokey side of it all (and as Mark Hamill has pointed out, it says a lot that West was able to play the role for laughs and seriously at the same time).

By that time, too, we had The Dark Knight and characters like Wolverine, the first of many bad-ass superheroes who were perfectly fine with killing bad guys and delivering snappy one-liners while doing it – which Adam West’s Batman would never have done in a million years.

Don't get me wrong – gritty realism and graphic violence has its place in comics. I liked Frank Miller’s take on the Dark Knight, and it’s an aspect of the character worthy of exploration, and one that has been explored well, possibly to the point of ad nauseum. But it’s just one aspect of a multifaceted and contradictory character. And West’s Batman is arguably at the core of the character – he may be an orphan who dresses up like a bat to punch the crap out of criminals, but he is also grounded in a very clear sense of right and wrong, and there are lines he will not cross.

Naïve and oversimplistic? Probably. But why not? For my money, superhero stories don’t have to be “realistic” in order to be entertaining or meaningful. They also work as basic good vs evil stories where good generally wins, eventually – and does so on its own terms rather than stooping to the level of evil. And the “terms” can be generally defined as what we think of as ideals of morality, citizenship and justice – where crime never pays and the bad guys never get away with it, but ensuring that without breaking the confines of a fair and impartial justice system. The fact that the real justice system is neither fair nor impartial – to say nothing of the fact that vigilantism technically is by definition extrajudicial – is beside the point. Classic superheroes tended to operate according to the principles of that system regardless of whether the system itself did or not.

We need stories like that, just as we need stories that focus on what happens when the system fails us. Because I don’t think you can really appreciate the significance of the latter without appreciating the aspirations of the former.

Also, as Neil Gaiman intimated in a Riddler story, the former is just more fun. And it’s evident we’re starting to see a backlash at least in DC films that have gone for gritty realism vs Marvel’s lighter approach. I personally love the Nolan Batman films, but that was a specific cycle of films. There’s no need to make the whole universe like that. Anyway, you know you’ve gone too far with the Dark Knight angle when the Lego films are making fun of you.

I suppose some might point to Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin as proof that light-hearted cartoony Batman doesn’t work. I don’t think it’s a fair comparison, partly because Schumacher went against the expectations of franchise fans at the time who expected Tim Burton’s version, but also because the problem with Batman and Robin wasn’t the one-liners, overacting villains and cartoon sound effects – it was a bad story, too many supervillains, a very clumsy and forced attempt to shoehorn Batgirl into the franchise and Robin basically acting like a petulant jerk.

So, anyway, respect to Adam West for helping create a square, straight-edge Batman that we could look up to and yet not take too seriously, all at once.

Go West,

This is dF

As you all know, Mary Tyler Moore is gone.

I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said – she was a TV staple of my childhood, and I do remember that final episode and what a big deal it was.

And with everyone talking about how revolutionary the show was in terms of featuring a female lead who wasn’t a housewife, I suppose it had some kind of background effect on me in terms of learning that women can be independent and have careers like anyone else. Which sounds obvious today, of course, but in 1970 this was still a new concept for many people. (So was the idea of putting a divorced female character on prime time TV, which was apparently the original premise, which CBS rejected.)

Anyway, among the tributes pouring in to MTM, some people have been posting covers of the show’s theme song.



The one I’ve known for years is, of course, the Husker Du version.



Then there’s the Joan Jett version.



You've probably heard both of those in the past week. 

And now Carrie Fisher is gone.

And somehow this pic just seems appropriate.



I don’t know what I can add to everything else being said about her. Obviously she was part of my pop culture landscape with Star Wars – Leia was one of the first female characters I saw onscreen who wasn’t a frail damsel in distress. She was smart, tough and funny.

Fisher was also a good writer (I’ve only ever read Postcards From The Edge, but it’s a very funny book), and a funny person. I also loved the fact that she brought her dog Gary along to interviews.



It’s sad that she’s gone, but it’s good that she was here. Not only did she embody one of the great female icons of my generation, she also did a lot of good works offscreen by talking about her addiction and mental illness issues. (One of my family members is a recovering alcoholic who has also been diagnosed as bipolar, so I’m not a disinterested bystander in the that regard.)

In closing, I’ll honor her request to report that she died the way she wanted to go – drowned in moonlight and strangled to death by her own bra.

A princess in a world full of dragons,

This is dF

EDITED TO ADD [29 Dec]: And a day later, her mom Debbie Reynolds has also passed, because that's how 2016 rolls. 

And so 2016 gets one more boot in with George Michael.

I have to confess, I’m one of the few people on the planet who wasn’t a big fan. Which is not to say I don’t think he was talented. He was a fine singer and a showman, and I can prove that with this video of him performing with Queen for a Freddie Mercury tribute/AIDS awareness fundraiser.



Sure, he’s no Freddie Mercury, but c’mon, no one was except Freddie. And in many respects Freddie was no George Michael.

That said, I was never really into Wham!, who I found to be a bit silly and pretty to be taken seriously. I’ll admit too that by the time I became aware of them, my musical tastes were more solidly in classic/heavy rock territory. And by the time George went solo, I was firmly in Punkville and turned off by Michael’s ubiquity. So … you know.

Now that I’m older and wiser (okay, older), I still can’t say I’m a fan, but it’s easier to see why Wham! were as big as they were, and why George ended up an even bigger pop star on his own. One thing I didn’t realize in the 80s was that Michael wasn’t just a pretty face being handed pro pop songs to sing – he wrote most of his own songs (both in Wham! and solo), and 30+ years later, his hits are still in circulation – one of them now being a staple Christmas song, albeit one that’s now going to have some extra emotional heft, seeing as how he passed on Christmas Day.

Anyway, here in HK he had his share of fans. And inevitably, one of the classic stories making the rounds here is the time that Wham! became the first Western pop group to play in mainland China.

It’s actually a fascinating story in terms of how they managed to land the gig (to include their manager screwing Queen out of the gig by portraying Freddie Mercury as kinda gay – hmmmm yes …) and how the audience had to be careful not to be seen having an unacceptably good time, etc.

Respect.

Guilty feet have got no rhythm,

This is dF

Gene Wilder is gone, as you probably know.

I should probably say something – partly because I’m a fan of many of his 70s films, but also because the very first film I remember seeing in a cinema was Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory.

Or at least it’s the first live-action film I remember. My parents may have taken me to see a Disney film or two (which would have been either The Jungle Book and/or The Aristocats), but I have no memory of that. But I vividly remember going to see WW&TCF. I was six when it came out, and I remember the contrast between the darkness of Charlie’s world (especially the scene where Slugworth tries to recruit him as an industrial espionage agent) and the bright Technicolor world of Wonka, and I remember the fates of the bad kids, and the twisted horror of the psychedelic riverboat scene (which scared the hell out of me).

And of course I remember Gene Wilder alternately singing, chattering and shouting his way through the picture. Wonka was the first movie character to stick in my head. He’s been there ever since, though it wasn’t until I was older that I realized just how well-constructed a character Wonka was, and how a lot of that was down to Wilder’s brilliant performance.

And then came his work with Mel Brooks – The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein – and Richard Pryor (the first two films, anyway).

By the 80s, I’d lost interest in Wilder after he seemed to just want to do sentimental romantic comedies, a genre which has never really interested me. The Woman In Red in particular seemed to cement his image as the Lionel Richie of Hollywood comedy – politely inoffensive romantic man in a cardigan – at a time when I was getting into horror movies and punk.

But I still enjoy watching him in his 70s heyday. I used to joke that he was one of the Great Shouting Actors Named Gene of my generation (the other one being Gene Hackman). But it’s intended as a compliment.

Incidentally, one Wilder film I’d recommend that isn't a Wonka or Mel Brooks film is The Frisco Kid (1979). You may want to approach with caution because (1) it got mixed reviews and (2) I haven’t seen it for over 30 years. But I remember liking it at the time. If nothing else, you get to see a younger Harrison Ford play cowboy.

Pure imagination,

This is dF

So you know Muhammad Ali is the latest celebrity casualty of 2016.

Which means, among other things, that he and Howard Cosell are together again.



I have to admit, I’ve never been a fan of boxing. But Muhammad Ali’s self-professed greatness transcended the sport. He was very much a part of my pop culture landscape as I was growing up, appearing on talk shows and the occasional sitcom. He even had his own Saturday morning cartoon for a bit.

And he was easily the most quotable sports figure of my generation outside of professional wrestling.

It’s interesting too that he was an Islam convert – which was controversial at the time, but arguably not as much as it would be in 2016 if some major non-white sports figure was to do the same. Certainly it didn’t prevent Ali from becoming a beloved pop culture icon. It’s fair bet that most Americans had forgotten Ali was a Muslim until Donald Trump inadvertently reminded them.

Anyway. Respect.

Like a bee,

This is dF

George Martin is gone.

Not the bloke who writes the Game Of Thrones thing. The fifth Beatle.

You can probably get good recaps of his Beatles career here and here. And of course there was more to him than The Beatles.

But it’s only fair that everyone focuses on the Beatles stuff, because that whole story illustrates the importance of having a good producer in the studio who knows how to collaborate with a given artist and get the best possible results. Some bands don’t require producer intervention. Some do. The Beatles may or may not have needed it, but there’s little doubt they benefited from Martin’s input, and very likely wouldn’t be as influential as they are now.

At least some of that comes to the sheer innovation that Martin enabled. Think of it this way – as big as Beatlemania was, The Beatles would have likely gone the way of other teen-idol pop groups (here today, gone tomorrow) if they hadn’t evolved into something more serious and innovative. And Martin was the key to making that innovation work, not least because of the technical limitations at the time. In these days of Pro Tools, software effects and digital editing, it’s easy to forget how hard it is to record, mix and edit a musically complex song with a four-track mixer, analog tape and a razor blade.



And I’ve done both analog and digital audio production, so take it from me.

Anyway, Martin gets full credit from me for taking both The Beatles and pop/rock music forward into new and unexplored realms. Yes, rock as a music form has been in arrested development for a long time now. But Martin helped get it to where it is now. We need someone else like Martin to find the right artists to show us how to move forward again.

One other thing I’ll say about Martin: he also wrote the score to what is arguably my favorite Bond film soundtrack.



Not to put down John Barry, who did some awesome Bond scores. But Live and Let Die is the only Bond soundtrack with wah-wah.

BONUS TRACK: Martin also produced Cheap Trick’s fifth album All Shook Up, which tends to be underrated because it didn’t have a lot of radio-friendly songs compared to Dream Police, and it’s relatively more experimental. But it’s still a solid Cheap Trick album, IMO. Here's the opening track.



Hello goodbye,

This is dF