Patt Morrison
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Comic Con 2011: like a long and meandering metaphor for something far worse
The most effective way of describing the foreign is by comparison to the familiar. Comic Con is a huge event and because of its scope, there’s a lot to compare it to. Let’s start by saying it’s a recipe: what’s in it?
1. A heaping portion of writers, artists and filmmakers.
2. A smattering of retail giants.
3. Flambéed (French for “to cook”) with a large helping of Hollywood funding.
Now take that product and then obfuscate it entirely by using masses of glassy eyed models and in quantities so large as to prevent one from looking elsewhere, ever. Now splay this abomination out like a carcass for feeding. Who will come?
In a metaphor: the entire planet.
In Mazda’s, Scions and other affordable Japanese automobiles, 125,000 guests descended like vultures to feed and feed they did - upon a painstakingly crafted and barely clothed spectacle of a triple C[1]. I’m guessing the sight of those remains would turn the stomach of even the most experienced morgue technician. Autopsy report: too many good times.
Alternatively to a corpse: maybe Comic Con is like Mardi Gras (Brazilian for “Festival of Comics”). But instead of revelers wearing basically nothing, everyone dresses like homeless Batman. Homeless Batman is like regular Batman, but is down on his luck and could just use a few bucks to make it by. Or really anything, man. Remember that movie “Pay it Forward?” Anyway, the models aren’t accounted for in this literary flourish, because they are consumed in an alternation between two modes of emotion: shamelessness and empathetic embarrassment.
How about this: Comic Con is like a mason jar stuffed to the glass with tadpoles, meandering in a very lazy circle. The feeble and packed-in creatures are swimming just fast enough to stir a gentle maelstrom which, far from a regular (non-mason jar/tadpole maelstrom), is very tedious to watch. Further mocking the natural majesty of a non-metaphorical natural phenomenon – this one contains a group of tadpoles dressed as Voltron.
The boring really begins to sets in when one realizes that 80% of these tadpoles aren’t even dressed like a super hero and are instead dressed like a total dweeb. Still, some are able to tolerate the jar’s confines by queuing up for 3 hours to see a screening of the “Big Bang Theory.” Another crowd might be waiting in line to get some tadpole food like kelp, algae or edible mold (these would represent the human foodstuffs that were ACTUALLY being sold like churros, pizza and edible mold.) One might think “I would definitely pay 175 dollars to see this!” Well you’re out of luck, because this is a metaphor. Save that cash and take a boat to Saltsraumen Norway: home of the world’s largest maelstrom!
So who was running the show? Were they too dressed like unkempt super heroes? No. But they did act like alligators. So I gave them the title “Los Cocodrilos” (Spanish for Los Crocodiles). Instead of using their teeth, like regular crocodiles, (which they are not - they are “Los Cocodrilos”) they would instead snatch up their prey with bargains on exclusive Dr. Who memorabilia and X-Men reprints. Our vultures and tadpoles are lucky if they got away with their necks, by which I mean wallets, by which I mean money.
To those of you familiar with Comic Con - the only surprises you might interpret are the great liberties I’ve taken with implied comparisons. Yeah, maybe there’s a chance I’m over-cooking these obvious beefs. Maybe. But we’re not done, so find yourself another plate and grab a seat at the bistro “SCPR Patt Morrison Blog” and get ready for more and watch out because it’s hot. In addi- and save room for dessert. In addition to being overcrowded and overpriced (this observation is original and good) the space could not accommodate. It felt like I was in a cattle bin packed hoof to hoof - with other cows (I’m also a cow ((I’m not above comparison)) in this scenario). Cows to be processed - processed into obvious beefs(teaks) and I think we’re about well-done.
For most of the patrons I spoke with, Comic Con seemed to have been a bitter-bite, but for others, it was an acquired taste. I’ll be honest that I used the words “hellish nightmare” in my four-hour long Grumble-Con (which was a “con” I was holding during and in the middle of Comic Con) but I’m guessing I am not in their target audience.
The moral is that clothes actually DON’T make the man, because a woman wearing a Batman costume is in reality, still a woman. Look it up if you don’t believe me. Another thing I learned is that metaphors can liken people to things that aren’t people and because of that, I don’t feel so mean. You see, I’m not doing anything to a person anymore –It’s like I’m only being cruel to a horse or a dog or something.
Check out the montage I put together at the bottom and remember: this entire piece is really just a metaphor for a well-written story published in The New Yorker.
[1]
It can blow up things, so please -- some respect for ''nuclear''
Not to be schoolmarmish about this, but just as E does not equal mc to the third power, neither is the power that this equation helped to harness [or unleash] to be trifled with -- or mispronounced.
In our segment today about whether Japan's domino-effect disasters of quake, tsunami and nuclear breakdowns could derail nuclear energy projects, the word came up a lot.
So, repeat after me:
Nuclear: NEW - klee - your.
''Klee'' rhymes with ''glee,'' as in the popular TV show. Easy mnemonic device.
Nuclear family. Nucleic acids. Nuclear Rabbit [the band, not a radiated hare]. A whole host of fabulous uses await you.
And now you know my ears' particular fingernails-on-a-chalkboard susceptibility.
In our next what-peeves-Patt installment: the ghastly attempts to modify the word ''unique.''
Stephen Hawking and me
I've interviewed so many renowned people over the years that I don't get very impressed any more. So naturally, it's the one man I can't interview who impresses me the most.
Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist and monumental thinker whose mind still takes him to places that his body -- and our bodies -- can never go, into the depths and abstractions of space, was at Caltech a couple of weeks ago, speaking through a voice generator to hundreds inside Beckman Auditorium and hundreds more outside, watching the proceedings on a big screen. [Students had lined up for hours to see him -- 13-year-old Evan Hetland of Valencia told the LA Times that ''it's like seeing the nerd pope!''
And a few of us, the very fortunate, got a private audience with this exceptional man. Hawking has had Lou Gehrig's disease -- amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the same disease that killed my father -- since he was a young man. The profound limitations to his body are in inverse proportion to the unfettered luminousness of his brain.
Unlike a lot of the Caltech people in that auditorium, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around what Hawking's mind, his abstractions of black holes and quantum matters, has conceived and thought through. I did tell him that I try to read his best-seller, ''A Brief History of Time,'' once a year, and intend to keep doing so until I finally understand it. [I am told that, in his turn, through his great Caltech friend and colleague Kip Thorne, Hawking flirted with me, which is one of those moments you put in your memoirs.]
Hawking's speech at Beckman Auditorium was more personal than scientific; he called it ''My Brief History,'' stories of his English childhood and his Cambridge education, droll and self-deprecatory -- and delivered in the American accents of the speech synthesizer that long ago supplanted his own voice.
Perhaps it's not a paradox that the man whose life has been composed of decades of borrowed time should spend so much of it contemplating the very concept of time itself; As he said at Caltech, the possibility of an early death "makes you realize life is worth living.''
Stephen Hawking and yours truly
-- photo by Michael Shermer
Lewis Black, Justice Ginsburg -- and You
As we launch into the loving-your-public-radio-station-means-never-having-to-buy-a-tote-bag season, I thought a little reminder was in order. It’s a reminder of the kind of programs and the caliber of guests that my team and I put before you every weekday.
Here are a couple of recent ones that have moved me beyond words.
There was Lewis Black, the humorist whose sardonic book, ‘’I’m Dreaming of a Black Christmas,’’ doesn’t begin to sum up the man.
He and I talked for more than a half-hour last week; he and his Comedy Central compadre Stephen Colbert are among the comics who have performed for troops in Iraq or Afghanistan or both, and Black is set to do so again in December.
There were two moments in our interview when he was so impassioned that he dropped the professional humorist role: one was when I played a cut of former Arkansas governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee mocking the Obama health care reform plan requirement that people with preexisting conditions not be denied health insurance because of their conditions.
Huckabee likened it to trying to get insurance on your house after it’s burned down; Black, who had just performed at a benefit for kids with cystic fibrosis, was livid. He invoked the ailing kids who’d been born with CF, and he called Huckabee a ‘’schmuck’’ – for want of a stronger term, because we were on the radio, after all.
The other moment came when I mentioned that Black was going back on a USO tour in December, making him a kind of Bob Hope with edgier humor, performing for military men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. As we talked, Black went on about these young, young kids in difficult, dangerous circumstances, and how politicians’ posturings and tributes can’t begin to describe what these young Americans go through. As he talked, he got a bit choked up – again.
And then there was my interview with Supreme Court associate justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman on the high court. She speaks so softly I sometimes had to lean in to hear her well. At one point she reached into her handbag, a little red and white woven affair, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why – until she brought out a well-thumbed and well-marked copy of the Constitution and other significant federal documents, including Article IV, and the Fugitive Slave Act.
After our interview, we talked a little longer about elements of Article IV and the slave act, which the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution rendered moot by outlawing slavery.
The Constitution didn’t use the word ‘’slave,’’ but that’s what the Act was about; any ‘’person held to service or labour’’ in one state who managed to escape still ‘’shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.’’ In other words, a slave was still property and had to be returned to the slave owner, under the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution, which requires one state to honor the contracts of another state.
Justice Ginsburg told me that novelist Herman Melville’s father-in-law was a Massachusetts judge and abolition supporter named Lemuel Shaw. In the turbulent years before the Civil War, that full faith and credit clause came into conflict with abolitionism and the underground railroad smuggling of slaves to safety and freedom.
In the notorious 1851 court case of an escaped Georgia slave named Thomas Sims, Judge Shaw ruled that he was bound by the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution, and had no legal choice but to return Sims to his slave-owner.
All this, Justice Ginsburg was telling me, left its mark on Melville, and on American literature. When Melville wrote his novella ‘’Billy Budd,’’ he modeled Captain Vere in part on his father-in-law, for Vere, too, was forced into an agonizing choice: as Melville described it, ``We are not talking about justice; we are talking about the law.’’ Vere had to condemn the angelic Billy Budd to hang for accidentally killing a shipmate.
Wow.
This is just by way of reminding you of some of the phenomenal guests you get to hear here, thanks to … you; in guests and programs like these, you get back every dime you put into these programs – and then some.
Thanks, and keep it up.
Bell Dude Gets the Charmin Treatment -- and Help for Phone Bill Hell?
After the authorities swooped in early one morning recently and arrested that bunch of Bell city officials, I had to wonder whether some of them might find jail a teeny bit less stressful than the prospect of showing their faces in public again.
There’s plenty of righteous anger that’s justifiably erupted among the residents of Bell, whose millions of dollars in hard-earned taxes, as the LA Times reported, were financing CEO-sized salaries and benefits for city officials.
So here’s one response:
Just a few days after onetime Bell city administrator Robert Rizzo posted $2 million bail and got to walk out of jail, his Huntington Beach house got garlanded in toilet paper.
About which tp-ing I have just one question –
Was it used?
Now, remember the lively talk we had earlier this week about the infuriating complexity and opacity of cell phone bills, and how they make the U.S. tax code look like a model of clarity? Well, the FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, wants to make them simpler, and he’s here to explain how – and even whether – it can be done. What I want to know is, can he read his own cell phone bill?
And the Republican and Democratic candidates for California lieutenant governor, Abel Maldonado and Gavin Newsom, will be debating why it is they want the job – and what exactly the lieutenant governor does.
David Lazarus is in my chair on Friday – be kind!
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