Bubbly Creek Via Kayak

OK, enough about comics and light bulb accidents. Yes, I flirt with death quite often. Sadly, I think I'm in Perdition. Yea, Steve, I've always thought I was the Bruce Willis character in UNBREAKABLE (more so in 12 MONKEYS), but a lot of people said I was more the Sam Jackson character. Quite a few people didn't "get" the film, I think because they aren't comic geeks. I always will be, though I am more often making my purchase based on a writer or an artist (examples being JG Jones and Alex Ross, as you by now know). Hell, I'm still geeked out over that last image of Superman & Batman, who, of course, is not dead. It's not a cop-out, though, if you are familiar with Jack Kirby's work, you'd get exactly what happened there.

Well, NOW maybe I'll get to talk about my favorite haint in Chicago. I was Googling images a few weeks ago and came up with some great posts, over thirty photos, a guy named Steely Dan took on an 11 mile kayak ride from downtown, past Bubbly Creek to about Western Avenue. I'll run maybe ten photos over the next day or so, as many of them are photos of downtown buildings. Posted here are an old radio tower, some weird square with a cannonball from the future in it, actual bubbles in the water, and the purest sign that we are on the south side of Chicago...an Old Style can discarded in the water. More tomorrow.

Final Crisis...Again

Issue 6 out of 7 arrived yesterday. This is the first issue that quite a bit of the artwork was not by JG Jones. For all intents, the last page is exactly as you see it, because for the next few years Bruce Wayne will not be Batman (Wayne will be back, but its confusing enough talking comics and keeping you interested w/o explaining everything, though I'll say, its not a cop-out or a sales ploy, there's a good reason why Wayne will not be around until maybe 2011). But check the final page (by Dough Mahnke) of #6 compared to JG Jones's final page in #3 (Wonder Woman, Catwoman, and Batwoman with a ball gag in her mouth), one can only imagine how Jones would have depicted the former. Something I forgot to mention in earlier posts, Grant Morrison created this wonderful Japanese superhero team led by Most Excellent Super-Bat and they are called the Super Young Team. Here is an entry from the sketchbook as well as from FC#2. I'm going to miss JG Jones's work on FC#7. Just compare those first two images, man. That second image is what my dreams look like.

Riding The Lightning

Well, I have come to the realization that I evidently cannot die. Earlier tonight I had another encounter with the dreaded Closet Light Bulb. You might recall my post from back in August, whereas I shattered the bulb with my superhuman polak/hillbilly strength and blew the electricity through half the house. A few hours ago I pushed the Mortality Envelope a bit higher (lower?)and, really, its not like I set out to do these things. The cord fell off the ceiling fixture last night, so I unscrewed the bulb and went to bed. Bought a new ceiling fixture, one of those circular things, from the Ace hardware, which constituted a half-mile walk when the mid-afternoon temps were at their highest, about ten below. So later, I'm listening to one of the CD mixes GW Ferguson sent me, and I'm on my little stool, ready to combat modern technology. I take the old fixture off, thinking, hey I'm fine, the last time I touched the filament in the bulb, and said bulb was gone. You can see where I'm going with this. I put my hand up with the new fixture and OF COURSE I touched the green wire and the red wire together. Last time, I kicked the stool over and dropped to the floor. This time, I just found myself on the floor, I had been listening to a song about Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower sniper, but then I was hearing "Do You Think I'm Psycho, Mama?" The song in between that I (kinda sorta thankfully) missed was "The Homecoming Queen's Got A Gun". So there I was, maybe 6-7 minutes later and about five feet across the room. So, my theory is this: either I can't die, or every time I do, one of my alternate Earth selves is shunted over here. Wouldn't be surprised if that is what happened to PK Dick every time he OD'd on the 200 amphetamines he downed each day. I'm thinking of a story I might write and send to F&SF, where Earth-20 me, who is a very successful writer and still has all his hair to give him a David McCallum kind of look, ends up here and finds he has to suddenly be balding plus lead a pathetic and wretched life.

Speaking of PK Dick, I've also mentioned here about my joint venture with "Horatio Salt" @joymotel over on Twitter, the link to the blog (for those who'd rather read it chapter by chapter) is on the left. Well, it was mentioned today in the Boston Phoenix, by Mark Miliard, and in a second article, names @joymotel as one of the top ten Twitter novels-in-progress, with ours being the only one shared between two writers, and who have never met nor talked, no less. Here's the excerpt.


Novel idea: Twitter fiction
Post-modernism, post by 140-character post
By MIKE MILIARD | January 14, 2009 | Recommended By 2 People

Toronto ad man John Kewley — he writes concisely for a living — likens Twitter, teeming with constant updates, to a global "brainstream" where users can submerge themselves in others' thoughts, feelings, and existential particulars. So he's co-writing a language-dense, James Joyce– and Philip K. Dick–inspired Twitter sci-fi narrative, Joy Motel, the plot of which plugs the reader into the protagonist's stream of consciousness.

Kewley's writing partner, Wayne Allen Sallee, is someone he's never met. ("We've never even spoken on the telephone.") Nonetheless, they correspond online, and "share a wavelength," and one day, when Sallee tweeted Kewley with "a snippet of a film noir–sounding sentence," Kewley replied in kind. "I sent him one back, to sort of build on his, and we did about 20 of those."

The pair banged on back and forth, braced by the brevity and immediacy mandated by the medium. "You can just jump on there because you have half a thought, and then an hour later, Wayne will respond," says Kewley. "We don't know where this is going. It's real-time writing on Twitter."

Manga Rorschach

I'll be damned if I can figure out how to open the file that shows all of the characters from WATCHMEN, manga-style, so this is the best I can do.

Pale Blue Dot

First off, the perigee moon that I expected not to see last night because of our cloud cover and 36 STRAIGHT HOURS OF SNOW. Twitter is great, first I met ad men, now I'm meeting astronomers. I asked Tavi Greiner--whose new website I have as a link on the left--to send a photo from Houston with a stick figure of me looking at it, but she did one better, putting my photo in the window. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN posted the version of the photo without me in it, otherwise on might think the moon was rising over an asylum. I did see the moon after all, when I took my border collie out at 2:30 AM, the snow had stopped an I could see the moon behind the clouds. Two years back, when I was working until 2 AM at the printing plant (the parking lot led to the woods which led to the Cal Sag Channel), I saw a deer at the edge of the tree line under a full moon. I'll always remember that instant.

OK, now. The Pale Blue Dot. This photo is from Astronomy Photo of The Day (APOD), the sun behind Saturn courtesy of the Cassini spacecraft. At the edge of the ring on the upper left, Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot," the Earth. Sagan had a wonderful quote that Sid Williams emailed me after 9/11 and I saw it again today when I hit one of the links on the APOD site. Here goes:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Puts everything into perspective, you know. We aren't going anyplace for awhile, if we don't go all Planet of The Apes or Soylent Green first. I may post about Earth-14 or Earth-22 (don't get me started that Marvel has about 60,000 multiversal Earths, with DC sticking with 52 for now, and yes, Bob, Mort Weisinger was the idiot savant of National Periodicals, DC's old name.) But I'm here with all you guys, friends, fans, foes, FoxNews=fatalism, Frank Miller, Finger Alley, and I have no idea why I'm stuck on the F's unless I'm maybe leading up to Full Throttle & Fuck It, which is the title of Steve Malley's blog. Yea, 6.2 billion people in a pretty small place. Carl Sagan was one cool cat.

Back On Earth-22

Sorry for the webcam shots, I can't seem to get my new scanner to work. What else is new? I'm not kidding about the multiverse, as these shots illustrate. I hope I am visible between Batman and Wonder Woman in the second shot. Alex Ross was involved with a story to rival WATCHMEN, KINGDOM COME, back in 1996, and you can see me in the crowd scene near the Earth-22 Superman. Long story short, this Superman, in his fifties, has been in Justice Society of America for the last six months and went back to Earth-22 this past week. Alex Ross has said that everything would fit perfectly, in KC#4 an atomic bomb is dropped on the superheroes, killing all but a handful. At the moment of impact, the older Superman was shunted to the Earth-1. When he goes back, he is at that exact moment, and the next few pages are newly drawn but reflect several scenes from KC#4, including the one with me as a member of the United Nations. This may seem like an odd & rambling post for those who do not read comics, but it was like deja vu for me, seeing the scenes leading up to my minuscule appearance. You can see I have a larger image, again as a UN delegate, in an oversized book called SUPERMAN: PEACE ON EARTH. I hadn't expected to see myself again, my Earth-22 self, and I haven't changed a bit. Once I figure out the scanner, I'll post the original page again. But now you know that when I ramble on about Earth-14 and such, I'm not making it up, I'm out there in multiple guises.

BAYOU GIRL

The flame gun is real, Lana & Von. Its from a 1950s ad that was reprinted on the LA Times' Daily Mirror blog. The snow isn't that bad and I actually walked out in my Chinese See Thru Kitchen t-shirt (yep, its at 109th & Western). Then I promptly slipped and fell into the snow, but screw it. I'm almost dry and I have an Arby's sandwich waiting for me in a few minutes. I read BAYOU GIRL, by John Thompson, years back, read the entire book on my way to and from the Chicago ComicCon. Its not that great a book, pulp fiction at its lurid finest. But I've always loved one passage of the book, and I have long saved it with a list of quotes I've saved over the years. The rest of the book is mediocre, but something about this passage just stays in my head.

It isn’t a Colorado moon...it is a lecherous red...almost. It leers...a carnal, fertile leer that makes the blood stir. Here I can wallow in richness, I can touch beauty. I can walk in that cypress and tear off its’ needles and smear myself with stickiness, the blood of the tree. Here I am part of the scheme of everything because I can creep into the bloodstream. I do not have to sit on a crag and admire a distant abstract. Here beauty is not something to be seen, but tasted, eaten, worn.