Well heckfire, no one showed up for my comics class this morning. I wish I could have seen myself hanging around the (locked) classroom door for half-an-hour before I left; I would have stayed asleep instead of waking up and finishing my class notes through a fugue of hangover. Well I’m awake now. Time to get productive Dharbin! Or at least continue waking up, because boy oh boy, that is a work in progress today.

I have been thinking this week about the Oscars: I just don’t get them. Is there a reason for them? I understand the awards part, but isn’t it just a reason for movie studios to promote their movies, get more people to go see The Hurt Locker or whatever?

And even that isn’t bad, that’s how our government is run too right? People spend millions AND MILLIONS of dollars to get into office, then spend their time their struggling to raise more money so they can stay in that office. Somewhere in there they make a lot of speeches cynically aimed at the stupidest and most impressionable parts of their perceived constituencies, and at least once or twice they vote for or against something. Afterwards I think there’s a party, with a lot of backslapping and cigar smoking.

But the thing that KILLS me about the Oscars is all the money that’s spent on the actual event. Not just the production costs, swag bags, all that–it’s the clothes baby, what’s the deal with all those clothes?? In a time when the entire nation of Haiti is more or less a pile of treeless rubble, sprinkled with tarp lean-to’s, and the rainy season about to begin… the best thing we as a society can do is throw a party for the movie industry.

And just to remind us of how important this party is, everyone should show up in $20,000 designer dresses or Versace tuxedoes, casually displaying their fancy shoes or handbags or dogs or whatever, as they pause to endure 2 minutes of flashbulbs on the (tented) red carpet before entering and practicing not looking directly into any of the hundred or so moving cameras.

Afterwards, they will complain bitterly about how celebrities have no privacy, how fame ruins everything, how “regular” people just don’t understand the incredible pressure.

That sounds pretty negative, I guess. But it’s gross, honestly. The idea of spending tens of millions of dollars on a big party when there are starving people literally everywhere is just nuts. Or sending a rocket to the moon for… for what? I love space, I love astronauts, NASA is like a codeword for “awesome.” But worrying about sending a manned mission to Mars when we have two very foggy wars going on, 10% unemployment, an increasingly monetized political system, and natural disasters all over the place.

Well, pardon me for saying that it sucks. But it does. SUXXXXX2000

Oh! I nearly forgot to mention that I put these three spreads up in my Flickr set, which will eventually comprise this entire 108-page or so sketchbook. You can click on any of the pictures to see them in Flickr, or here for the whole set. Hope you like it yo!

So yesterday was my 35th birthday, and last night I did a poetry reading at Snug Harbor in honor of this auspicious occasion.  The turnout was good, I think they told me about 70 people? Which is not as good as in the old days, but pretty surprising considering I really only publicized it through Facebook and some light word-of-mouth. Plus a lot of the people I thought for sure would be there were not — so double super flattering for the ones that did. 

The last time I did this was in 97 or 98 or so, I can never remember.  I had expected to be really out of practice and clumsy, but it may be that I was doing it wrong before, and so by being out of practice at doing it wrong, I did it right? You know? Either way, everything worked, people had a good time, laughed or clapped in the right places.  But I did completely forget to thank Elizabeth Steinfels of Hong Kong Vintage, who with pretty much zero notice organized me a little kiddie desk and chair and a pulpit; not to mention carting all that there and back.  So nice. 

Anyway, lots of sweet stuff said by some of my favorite people, and it was a good night. I stayed up late talking with a pretty girl, and then true to form woke up at 8.30 this morning CLICK! and couldn’t get back to sleep. Whoa, is this too much information?  Sorry guys I’m still groggy and got paid last night to talk about myself, I guess the rush hasn’t worn off yet.

A COUPLE OF THINGS I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT:

1) A week or two ago I saw INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.  Do you know this movie?  Quentin Tarantino?  I liked it, it was fun, there are parts of it that are pretty amazing. 

BUT–the story was completely weird, filled with strange holes and dangling plotlines.  SPOILERS BELOW–There are three or four stories going on, like in a lot of Tarantino’s movies, but in this one they don’t seem to really converge at all; at best they sort of get near each other briefly, like seeing the opposing lanes of a highway flit in and out of view.  Characters are introduced and we get whole backstories and flashback sequences and all sorts of tidbits about them, and then they’re promptly snuffed out, with no discernible consequence to the larger plot.

And the end, what was the deal with that?  All the storylines converge in this theatre, and pretty much everybody dies? For no reason?  I get it that war is hell and everything, and showing the gritty, seamy underbelly of things is part of Tarantino’s schtick.  But listen: if you’re going to rewrite the end of World War II, the bloodiest conflict in mankind’s history; if you get to rearrange everything just how you like it, including a completely gratuitous execution of Hitler, Goebbels, and the entire German High Command…

Well, you could make it make sense, couldn’t you?  Just saying.  Soon I’ll be starting my first longform narrative, and I’m thinking about storytelling a lot, so maybe I’m being hypercritical. And I did enjoy the movie, except for all the talking talking talking all the time, usually just before all the talkers kill each other and a new scene starts, where the new talkers try to figure out what the old talkers were talking about…

Oh, and the Mike Myers cameo completely pretty much ruined any chance of taking the thing seriously. There are plenty of old British dudes who wouldn’t need thousands of dollars of makeup to fill that role in a way that didn’t complete rob the movie of half its gravitas, its sense of being important–especially after the INCREDIBLE opening scene, just an amazing start to the movie.

2) Battlestar Galactica. More SPOILER ALERT: the spoiler is that this show sucks. Holy Cow, it’s like a total breakdown, whoever’s in charge is insane.  How in the world did they make that little story take 4-5 seasons? Not to mention a couple of TV movie things thrown in there?  Here’s the story:

a) People make these Cylon robots, which rebel, evolve, and then rebel again, effectively destroying the human race except for a relatively small number of survivors.

b) Those survivors try to find a new home, because they get tired of flying around in a bunch of dingy spaceships pretty quick.

c) Some of the survivors are actually Cylons, but

d) It doesn’t matter, because at the last minute Starbuck magically remembers the coordinates of “Earth” and they teleport there.

e) Oh, and everyone decides to get rid of all their technology, fly their spaceships into the sun, and walk off with bindles into the mountains.

You can argue some of that.  A lot of people think the writing, acting, and music on the show were really great, really groundbreaking, exceptional stuff.  I don’t; I think it was terrible.  I think the only thing worse than the acting was the ridiculous story.  ESPECIALLY because it was obvious by the end that they just kind of wandered up to this point, and that the entire previous series was just a bunch of misdirection and plot reversals standing in for real drama.  There should be a Battlestar Galactica drinking game, where each time there’s a countdown–”okay we’ll wait just ten more seconds and then we’re outta here“–you take a drink.  You would die of cirrhosis before you ever finished the series.

SO ANYWAY.

I think what I’ve REALLY been thinking about lately is the low standards we set for things — I work in comics, and the same thing happens there.  People will talk about a story being really true-to-life and gritty and all that, really “adult”, but leave out the part where the star of the story wears a bodysuit and has a ring which lets him do anything he can imagine! Oh but it doesn’t work on the color yellow. 

Why do we accept things that aren’t good?  Or a better question, leaving out the subjective “good”: why do we take our escapist fiction, our “fun” tv shows, and try to pretend that they’re groundbreaking? Why not just be happy with our guilty pleasures and not worry about whether or not they’re genius?  It’s like if the editors of America’s Funniest Home Videos started trying to really get amazing with the cuts in their montages.  Why not just accept that Green Lantern is just a fun little thing and leave it?  Because if you look at BSG as a cool sci-fi show with a bunch of space battles and intergalactic intrigue, it’s fine.  But once you try to hang a bunch of spiritual mumbo-jumbo and karmic crapola on top of that framework, once you try to get heavy…

well I just don’t think that framework is strong enough to support all that pathos.  It’s not that BSG–or Green Lantern, or whatever–shouldn’t aspire to greatness.  But they need better, stronger, more adult underpinnings if they want to throw all that heavy weight on the girders.

Hm, even as I type that I can see problems with that argument.  But today is Labor Day, and yesterday was my birthday, and I’m already tired of talking about this.  I think I’m just grumpy because The Wire is so amazing, so well-made, well-crafted, that most other things just seems shabby in comparison.  One more season left!

My intense love for this cartoon makes me want to make some pretty hyperbolic statements. Even now, even two sentences in, I’m still struggling. It’s too hard for me to separate in my mind the INTENSE nostalgia and just… satisfaction this thing brings out in me, from a more critical (and still satisfied) adult perspective.

For one thing, and in a somewhat bizarre but entirely appropriate coincidence, I’m finishing Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem right now, which is all about causality, quantum theory, polycosmic so-and-so. So it’s hard to watch a cartoon that is, at its heart, a long sequence of cause-and-effect events, strung together over one of the funkiest backbeats I think I’ve ever heard.  It’s hard to imagine the novel and the cartoon being any more different, but if I could include both in a mixtape, well…  But I’ll say more about Anathem in another post.  I’m having enough trouble describing this cartoon.

While its usually hard to remember how something felt when you were a kid, I can watch this and instantly go back to seeing it 30 years ago, marvelling at how right each successive event was.  While I don’t have OCD, I do take intense, often time-consuming and distracting pleasure in organizing things, filling out forms, basically putting things in their places.  And while I’ve never really enjoyed getting high, going “out of my head”, et cetera, when I was a kid this was like getting high to me.  This cartoon was like an OCD birthday party:  basically dozens of shots of things happening JUST BECAUSE, the way they were supposed to, the ball each time finding its way into its various temporary homes. 

WHAT IN THE WORLD was the chain of events that created this cartoon?  Besides the animation itself, right out of some back page in The Push Pin Graphic, there’s that extraordinarily funky music.  Is that the funkiest backbeat ever?  Hard to say, but GOOD GOD, I can’t get it out of my head.  I don’t want to get it out of my head.  Can you imagine being part of the group of people that made this?  Sitting around the table saying, “and then a monkey jumps out of the elephant and tees the ball up; maybe Teddy Roosevelt can catch the ball in his mouth?”  Someone in the comment section at the Youtube post says that it’s THE POINTER SISTERS singing?  If this came out today, it would cost 20 million dollars, win an Oscar, and launch its own line of merchandise.  But in the 70’s it was just 2 minutes and 42 seconds on The Electric Company (or Sesame Street, maybe both), broadcast to a bunch of 4 year olds, each of whom stored the memory somewhere deep and secret, to be unearthed and treasured periodically for the rest of their lives.

Unearth this:  the last 10 seconds of the thing MIGHT be among my favorite pieces of art of all time.  I know, it’s crazy.  But if you judge art based on its power to inspire, to mystify, and most of all TO PLEASE, something about the end of this cartoon hits me deep, somewhere in my lizard brain.  Almost as if I’ve been there, almost as if I’ll be back soon. 

TWELVE!

You know, I was finishing dinner, getting ready to come back here to my office and continue research for a series of strips about famous Indians (the Native American kind, not the “real” kind).  Before I could summon the energy to get up from the sofa, the episode of Andy Griffith I was watching ended and out of nowhere the Charlie Brown Christmas special came on. This is a terrible thing to come on if you’re not expecting it. You really need to prepare yourself emotionally–I could feel my eyes start burning practically from the opening credits.

And the thing is, the Charlie Brown Christmas special is hardly a wonderment of innovation, right? Voiced by stuttering children, edited by a person who was clearly drunk or insane or both, and featuring some of the most baldly, unapologetically heart-on-sleeve writing you can imagine–it’s hard to imagine that this ever got made. Clearly the fact that Charles Schulz was already swinging some heavy money bags back in ‘65 had a lot to do with it; but if Peanuts is one of the most influential, nuanced, and downright graceful pieces of cartooning ever, then the Charlie Brown Christmas is its polar opposite.

And still with the water works.  What gives?  It never even occurred to me to get up and NOT watch it.  When I was a kid it wasn’t Christmas until this special had come on.  I would start scanning the TV Guide for it in November, still excited from the just-viewed “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!”.  I loved it then, and for some reason I love it now.  It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t love it, who doesn’t instantly melt a little when they hear that lonely, plaintive “Christmas Time Is Here…” song start up, like God’s own orphans warbling out their lonesome carols. 

What is it about this weird mishmash of a cartoon special that resonates so much with, of all people, children?  Within the first few minutes of the thing, Sally turns to Linus and utters, in her real-little-girl voice, the title of this post, in reference to what she expects to get for Christmas.  And just seconds later, after Charlie Brown tells psychiatrist Lucy that he’s depressed–literally, he says, “I feel depressed.  I know I should be happy, but I’m not”–she comes back with this gem:

“I think we’d better pinpoint your fears.  If we can find out what you’re afraid of, then we can label it.” 

What child ever got  that?  I’m sure I didn’t–that’s practically over my head today, and I’m 34 years old.  The first 10 minutes of the special are filled with zingers like that, some even more depressing.  And I don’t mean to say I think the thing was so well-written that a kid couldn’t get it.  I think this thing was terribly written.  But still, there I sit on the sofa, still with some cream-style corn drying on my lip, knowing I’m going to break down once Linus makes his speech near the end. 

I watch this thing pretty much every year, if I’m lucky.  To me, there’s almost nothing that more perfectly sums up the awful sense of loss, of wistful longing, that separates childhood and adulthood.  Trying to remember what it felt like to be a kid, to have no responsibility, to suffer the mercurial joys and assaults that childhood–and especially other kids–can wield; it’s almost impossible.  The Charlie Brown Christmas special is a thing made by grown men, especially one grown man who would spend his life trying to explain, or at least cope with, his own sadness.  I think that’s what makes it still special somehow, 30 years after seeing it for the first time, and 43 years after it was made–these old Charlie Brown TV specials are basically a bunch of grown adults getting together and trying to approximate childhood.  There’s virtually no artifice in the thing at all–they’re certainly not trying to sell something, or at least weren’t at that point. 

And for all its warts and infirmities, it does something amazing and beautiful.  Maybe it’s the faltering voices of children reading their lines, or the ramshackle way the thing is put together.  But whatever the reason, this scene lays me out every time:

You can’t argue with tears. Tears mean you lose, if you’re trying to analyze, or be snarky, or whatever smart-guy thing you thought you had in mind. It’s kind of nice, and kind of terrible, that crying a little bit during the Charlie Brown Christmas special, with creamed-corn still in your beard, is a yearly Christmas tradition. I mean, show me somebody whose life isn’t kind of nice and kind of terrible, and I will show you someone who is not a fan of Charlie Brown.