You've probably encountered this at some point or another -- after recommending an anime to a friend, they immediately say, "Nah, I'm not gonna watch that. I don't like anime." Hell, some of you might even be that person.

Well, I have a confession to make: I used to that person. But I'm not anymore, thanks to the persistence of my anime-loving girlfriend, Justique. She just wouldn't give up until she found an anime that I liked.

Some of the following selections happen to be my favorite anime (although the order of this list is not necessarily reflective of my own person tastes). But regardless of my favorites, at least one of these anime series or movies is sure to change the mind of even the most staunch anime hater out there.

9. Street Fighter Alpha: The Movie - Okay, let's suppose that the anime hater in your life is opposed to Japanese animation because they're just not familiar with the characters. Well look no further than this movie! It's a Street Fighter prequel of sorts that shows the gang coming together sorta like The Muppet Movie... just with a lot more blood and hadoukens.

8. Baccano - Personally, I don't like this series at all. But I can recognize a crossover hit when I see one. Baccano is a supernatural action story set in early 1930s America. So not only is it unconventional, but it's also set in the USA, which is sure to appease those anime haters among us who can't handle the Japanese culture shock.

7. Ghost in the Shell - This is by far the most traditional anime on the list. I've included it because it's an incredible story with gorgeous animation and a profoundly intricate plot. This is the movie to show to the anime haters that think everything animated in Japan looks like Dragon Ball Z.

6. Weather Report Girl - Ahhhhh, yes!!! I love it. This rare and extremely brief two-episode anime series is about a weather girl who works for a Japanese TV station... who's obsessively driven to succeed... and enjoys furiously masturbating whenever she gets the chance. This is an extremely adult tale that's best to show to haters who think that all anime is made for tweens.

5. Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - Alright, so this show is probably the most controversial entry on this list. Why? Because it features a lot of the tropes that often give anime a bad rap among non-fans. But it's sooooooo goddamn good that it had to make this list. It's a light-hearted, feel-good story about an awkward crew of Japanese high school students who aren't quite what they seem.

4. Avatar: The Last Airbender - Disclaimer: this isn't a Japanese series. In fact, it's a Nicktoon. As in it aired on Nickelodeon. But it's often regarded as anime by many people out there. Even though I question that classification, there's one thing that I don't question in the least -- the quality of this three-season TV show. It's absolutely brilliant. Avatar is complex, emotional, and surprisingly all-ages.

3. Perfect Blue - This is the most straight-forward story on this list. A burgeoning Japanese pop star is haunted by a stalker. That's it. Pretty simple in concept. But it's wonderfully rich in suspense and imagery. Remember when I told you to show Weather Report Girl to haters who assume that all anime is juvenile? Well, you should probably show them this one first.

2. Welcome to the NHK - This is the anime to watch with haters who think that all Japanese animation is filled with busty babes, ridiculous action, and post-apocalyptic futures. NHK is the antithesis of the anime cliche. It's a slice-of-life story about a troubled shut-in and his two best friends. It's also an incredibly moving story that's potent in any language.

1. Shin Chan - Finally, we've reached the ultimate anime to convert even the most stubborn of non-believers! Shin Chan is The Simpsons meets South Park, but with more fart jokes. It's a family sitcom primarily following a five-year-old boy who says abnormally adult things while maintaining all the mischievousness of his youth. Though I've never tried to watch this show with subtitles, I can't imagine it'd be much of a hater breaker that way. For this series, you want to make sure that the anime denier in your life is watching the English dubbed version, which is notable for airing on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.

ALSO CHECK OUT:
- The Top 9 Horror / Psychological Anime - Part One
- The Top 9 Horror / Psychological Anime - Part Two

During O, Miami, I met many incredible poets. I also met Kool Moe Dee and Monie Love, both of whom turned out to be incredibly caring and eloquent people.

I also met James Franco, which probably means something to all you fans of the Spider-Man movies. Here's pictorial evidence :

This, I think, would officially be the closest I've ever gotten to an encounter with pop culture. I think you can tell from our facial expressions that it really meant a lot to both of us.

The next most recent encounter, before the festival, was a time two winters ago, when I was walking down the street in Chelsea, Manhattan, just after a large snowstorm, and walked past Willem Dafoe (I know, the other Spider-Man actor!, crazy!), and I was looking at him, being all, like, "I think that's Willem Dafoe!" and he looked right back at me and without even nodding, acknowledged the fact that he was, indeed, Willem Dafoe, and that no words or body language need pass between us.

And one of my best friends kind of looks like Elijah Wood, who is easily confusable with Tobey Maguire, and my mom used to watch Wings a lot, so I feel like I've pretty much met all the important actors from the Spider-Man movies. And Kirsten Dunst. Kirsten Dunst.

The show, done in conjunction with Abe's Penny micro-magazine, also features a lecture space where we're having several readings, taking place throughout April. Christy Gast, who runs the gallery, asked me to pose in a few places in the gallery, to take some preview pictures. And, by chance, I was wearing my Audioshocker.com t-shirt (this only a day after being pictured in the Miami Herald wearing a Dogfish Head brewery t-shirt (brewing up a minor scandal of my own)), so I thought it was only right to share a couple of preview images here as well, a day in advance of the show's opening on Saturday night.

Pete at the Abe's Penny Poetry Podium

"My Name is Pete, and I'm a Culturologist."

I recently started drinking Ketel One Vodka. Why? Because it makes an exceptionally smooth Vodka Soda, and it is cheaper than Grey Goose. (come on people, C.R.E.A.M) Anyway, as of today, Ketel One's website is under construction, and this is wholly unacceptable. How does a major brand, especially one associated with liquor/spirits giant Diageo, get away with such an egregious marketing violation? Let's do some research.

A quick Whois query shows that the domain name has been registered since 1995 (actually, surprising forward looking given the time), but the domain is curiously set to expire in November of this year - pending intervention by the parent/registrar. Basically, this means that Ketel One has had at least 16 years to get it's shit together, and at least 13 years before the Diageo partnership.

Next, the WayBack Machine will prove that Ketel One has had a functional website since 1996. It had a background texture, grainy images, incorporated several links, and got to the point quite quickly: Ketel One is...the smoothest vodka imaginable. This website ran through 1997. From 1998-2000, things got a little more better, fixed width layout, more graphic navigation, martini recipes -- even a 'free video'.  2000-2008 brought various version of a flash based/intro-ed website. Post 2008, the WayBack Machine has no data, but the copyright/last update date on the current website is from 2009.

Ad Age reports that Grey Worldwide took over the Ketel One account back in 2009, and launched the 'Gentlemen, this is vodka" campaign back in Q2 of that same year. So then, perhaps there was a time lag associated with the changeover. But wait, the website copyright hasn't changed since 2009, and the copy on the website reflects the current campaign. I am going to hypothesize that Grey has been in control of the site since they got the account. Does that mean the site has been under construction for almost two years? [Since I don't have the WayBack Machine to prove my case for 2009-2011, I'm appealing to all of you for the facts]

If Grey were my agency , and they tried to sell me on a placeholder website for any longer than a month, I would have fired them on the spot [nothing personal against Grey!]. I acknowledge that according to the Diageo website, Ketel One is not a 'Global Priority Brand' -- but still, the marginal effort to create a decent website (flash based or not) is quite low. How can you afford not to have something up to date at all times? With social/Internet connected shopping becoming a reality, if you are going to put your URL on your bottle, make sure it leads to something useful. There is no value in investing in QR/mobile/WAP/apps/whatever if you don't have the content to back it up.

And that's the whole point isn't it? Either you have a website or you don't -- and with the abundance of social media outlets and web savvy professionals - is there really an excuse to not have an up to date web presence? Even a basic Twitter/Wikipedia/FB strategy would be sufficient to keep me engaged.  There is no currently official Twitter page, and Ketel's Wikipedia game is pretty sparse. The site does direct users to a Facebook fan page, but is not making use of Facebook's integrated features or even the Like button.

Now, I've seen the print/tv/outdoor ads. I totally dig the "Gentlemen, this is vodka" campaign, but how on Earth are you calling yourself marketers with such a newbie move? Keep your old website up until the new one is ready --- or don't introduce the new campaign until all of the collateral is ready! Worried about scaring people off? If you have been collecting emails and gaining fb/twitter fans, you have plenty of ways (don't write off RSS either!) to inform customers about your new site and keep them engaged.

My hastily drawn conclusion: Diageo/Ketel One, call up your account exec at Grey, or any one of the myriad web shops out there and get a real website.

And maybe, just maybe, I'll have time for some Culturological bulletins here and there in the meantime.

Need some proof of Barry's instructional prowess? Here's a freebie. As you can see, Barry is all about getting you comfortable with the technique.

Personally, I'm excited to finally learn the finer points of doing the Stanky Leg and the Harlem Shake. (By far, my two most favorite dances. ever.)

Guess what I'm gonna write about today? I BET YOU CAN TELL FROM THE TITLE! Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Cycles and fads in pop culture. Actually, that's probably what I'll write about every time I do this column. But anyway, I digress. On with today's rant.

I feel like I'm living in strange times right now. Maybe it's my newfound reclusiveness, hiding out and working on my own comics everyday. Or maybe it's because things really are changing around me in a direction that I appreciate.

I remember back in the early to mid 00s, actions and items that I'd once considered eccentric cultural habits of mine became pop culture fads. Mesh hats, once worn as a joke by my friends and I, could be purchased at your local Hollister and were being worn by the people that used to tell me I looked like a "retard" for wearing them.

Raw garage rock became hot. Movies actually parodied things that I thought should be parodied. And for a brief time from 2004-2006, I thought top 40 radio was listenable. Hell, even mainstream comic books started producing crossovers that I thought were intriguing and insightful! Was it me changing to meet pop culture or was it pop culture changing around me?

Every few years, I feel in sync with pop culture. Then I fall painfully out of sync. Then I fall in again when I least expect it. Right now, I feel as though I've mistakenly fallen in again.

Marvel vs. Capcom -- once a niche game that I shared with my closest friends as a particular passion of mine -- has made a roaring resurgence. My fingers ache from online play. I would say I've spent more time playing it and talking about it this week than I've spent following world events... except it's an entertainment world event and I'm just one of the millions following it.

MvC3 is just an example of one thing I feel in sync with right now. The list goes on -- a plethora of weird animated films at the movies, Netflix streaming becoming the new way to watch media (b-movies!!!), superhero stories leading the forefront of mass entertainment, and concepts of freedom and tolerance becoming international norms for people that are tired of being held down by ignorant social structures.

So I wanna pose the question again -- is it me changing to meet the pop cultural status quo or has pop culture slowly cycled back to a place where I don't loathe it?

Exhibit A

For a long time, I really prided myself on my thorough-going ambivalence to The Radioheads. By the time I was aware of their presence on the pop music scene (via friends listening to "Creep" or those animated videos from OK Computer) I understood to write them off as "whiny post-grunge opportunists" and "tools of the corporate hit-making apparatus." So even tho OK Computer came out at a time when my susceptibility to such things should have been quite high (I was a sophomore in high school), I never even bothered to listen to the album straight through.

In fact, I made it all the way through college (when Kid A and Amnesiac were released to massive accolades) without ever listening to OK Computer all the way through (though I did give at least cursory listends to the aforementioned smash electronica hit albums). It wasn't until I went to graduate school for the first time (Fall 2004) that I finally listened to OK Computer straight down (due in some part, I'm sure, to the fact that one of my roommates that year was the aforementioned Dan, whose favorite band The Radioheads are). To put it succinctly: I didn't realize what a good band Radiohead was until Coldplay came out.

And then Radiohead did their whole In Rainbows thing, which liked more for the "pay what you want" model of its release. The album itself was pretty lame, and I was sad to read/see interviews where the band talked about how much they liked it (I thought Hail to the Thief was way better). But it was nice to see some anarcho-socialist principles in play with an album self-released outside of the accepted corporate-driven control structures of pop music, with consumers empowered to pay what they believed the content of the album to be worth. And some of the tracks were fine.

But now, with The King of Limbs, we're back to paying standard-issue fees for digital versions of the album ($9? Get out of here...). And Radiohead have proven themselves as just another pop band churning out singles (see the above video), not really interested in pushing forward their music stylistically, or continuing to sit on the forward guard of the new music market. Oh well. A band that was pretty interesting there, for a few years, is boring again. Yawn.

The glorious stanza is this one:

His bony beird wes kemmit and croppit,
Bot all with cale it wes bedroppit,
And he wes townysche, peirt, and gukit.
He clappit fast, he kist and chukkit
As with the glaikis he wer ouirgane.
Yit be his feirris he wald have fukkit -
"Ye brek my hart, my bony ane."

Pretty evocative. Fuck Yeah! There's another classic stanza in there was well, in the history of racy verses:

Quod he: "My kid, my capirculyoun,
My bony baib with the ruch brylyoun,
My tendir gyrle, my wallie gowdye,
My tyrlie myrlie, my crowdie mowdie,
Quhone that oure mouthis dois meit at ane,
My stang dois storkyn with your towdie:
Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane."

According to his Wikipedia entry, Dunbar is also a forefather of printing the word "cunt" as well, but I really think that both "tyrlie myrlie" and "crowdie mowdie" (especially the latter) are better.

I fell into a kind of stupor entering 2011, and one of my apparent New Year's resolutions was to allow Culturology to slip into an unannounced hiatus. But we're back, because of developments on the scene of nasty novelty rock that we here at AudioShocker just shouldn't let go unnoticed.

Back in the Fall of 2006, having spent the previous two years living in Boston, I found myself back in Pittsburgh for four months. Nick and I took full advantage of my time there, not only getting Dirty Weekend back together for an epic reunion show at the 31st Street Pub and recording fine demos of two new songs, we also recorded a handful of new tunes under our The Frank Sanchez Band moniker. When the ghost of Frank Sanchez occupies our bodies, Nick and I can sing some pretty filthy things. But I should touch on one other thing...

Going to college in the first years of the millennium, certain cultural experiences were pretty standard for the course, and two that I associate pretty closely are 1) Watching CKY videos (CKY2K coming out just in time for my and Nick's freshman year of college) and 2) Listening to songs by Boston's cock-metal favorites, Anal Cunt. Maybe because there was an AxCx song in CKY2K. Anyway, it was mostly for their track titles, which were super-offensive, but occasionally, one--looking back--must admit, made one chuckle. "I Got Athlete's Foot Showering at Mike's" is a classic. I don't think I watched CKY stuff very often, or ever listened to these songs very much, but they were out there.

So, when you come to record vulgar variety songs of your own, you tend to be aware of your influences. My biggest influence was Nick (I think my own song-writing was safely of the lonely nerd novelty genre, until he coached me along the Way of the Dirt), and his influences were... I'm not even sure... 2 Live Crew, certainly... and, Rod Stewart, I guess. Bill Cosby? But never did we say to ourselves "Let's record songs like the kind Anal Cunt makes."

Fast forward to 2010. Those 2K6/7 Frank Sanchez songs have been up at MySpace for nearly half a decade already--and listened to about twice a year. And Anal Cunt has just put out a new album. Anal Cunt, presumably, still has the strong following of shock-giggling teenagers that they've had since making the scene back in the late 80s. The Frank Sanchez Band, thankfully, goes mostly unnoticed there on the ol' internet. So, without further ado, I present two you two exhibits:

EXHIBIT A: The Frank Sanchez Band - "Fuck Yeah" (2006)

EXHIBIT B: Anal Cunt - "Fuck Yeah" (2010)

Listen to it here.

As much as I want to take some kind of credit for this--that one of the 49 listens of "Fuck Yeah" on MySpace was by Anal Cunt, and they were like "great idea,"--the moral is, mostly, that there are only so many ideas to be had out there in the world of offensive rock music. But we got to this one first. And then, thankfully, retired. (Like Frank Zappa would say, "they're just words," but after a while, I think most of us get tired of them...)

A year and a half ago, I did a list called The Top 9 Most Underrated Comedy Movies of the Past Few Years. Here now is my return to that theme... my updated list of the Top 9 most underrated comedies of the past few years!

9. Finishing the Game. I love 70s movies. I love Bruce Lee. And thus I loved liked this movie. It didn't blow my mind or make me piss myself, but it was an entertaining mockumentary that rewarded me for being a Bruce Lee fan. Plus, it was a good Hollywood satire. [Buy it now: Finishing the Game on Amazon]

8. The Slammin' Salmon. Wait... this went direct-to-video but Club Dread was in theaters? THAT'S A CRIME! Similar to Finishing the Game, this wasn't super laugh out loud funny, but it had a lot of chuckles and it certainly kept my attention. It's like Waiting... but better. [Buy it now: The Slammin' Salmon on Amazon]

7. The Brothers Solomon. Truly stupid. It's hard to watch this and not cringe at the ignorance of the characters, the concept, and the humor. But there're some surprisingly hilarious and unexpected jokes that come out of left field and slap the funny in your face. [Buy it now: The Brothers Solomon on Amazon]

6. Midgets vs. Mascots. DISCLAIMER: Not for everyone! It's racist, sexist, homophobic... and so on. It's a parody, so it's not all those things in a serious way. But it'll offend you. Me, on the other hand, I think the shart scene is the greatest achievement in modern cinema. [Buy it now: Midgets vs. Mascots on Amazon]

5. I Love You Phillip Morris. Part of me wants to swap this movie out for Dance Flick and leave it off the list... BUT I left it on here because it's criminally underrated. I haven't heard any talk or buzz about it! It's funny and emotional, and it sticks with you. [Buy it now: I Love You Phillip Morris on Amazon]

4. Death at a Funeral. (The American remake, that is.) I heard bad reviews. I assumed it was Martin and Chris Rock's The Expendables. I was wrong. It's a fantastic screwball comedy along the lines of Dinner for Schmucks (another underrated comedy, natch). [Buy it now: Death at a Funeral on Amazon]

3. The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard. Wow. I should have expected no less from Neal Brennan. I mean, this was shockingly funny. Stupid, yes. But incredibly funny. One of those "choke on my own laughter" kinds of funny. DISCLAIMER: It's very ignorant!!! [Buy it now: The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard on Amazon]

2. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Extended Cut). The extended cut is looong, but it's fantastically funny. I mean, it's better to the point where I wouldn't recommend watching the non-extended cut. Bonus: this movie has lots of quotable moments. And penis. [Buy it now: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story on Amazon]

1. Gentlemen Broncos. This choice is odd for me considering how often I favor in-your-face joke delivery. But I love this film up and down. It's probably the most underrated AND funniest thing on this list. It's insane, quotable, and warrants multiple viewings. [Buy it now: Gentlemen Broncos on Amazon]

More:
- See this same list of underrated comedies on our AudioShocker Amazon aStore
- The Top 9 Most Overrated Comedy Movies of the Past Few Years

Why the Top 9? Because 10 is too many and 9 is better. 3 X 3 = Awesome. Now that’s what I call math.

Kickass, right? Jack really nailed Time Log's visual style!

That's right!!! The 3rd annual YOU DON'T SUCK Awards are on! It's the end of December, and that means it's time for you to let us know your favorites from 2010.

Categories this year include:

• Comics [webcomics count too, people!]
• Movies
• Music
• TV
• Books
• And the newcomer darkhorse category... Tea!

So tell what you watched, listened to, read, and drank this year that rocked your world. We'll be accepting nominations for the next few weeks, and then we'll announce the winners of the 2010 YOU DON'T SUCK Awards via podcast in late January / early February.

Oh, BTW, here are 2009's YDS winners and 2009's nominations, and here are the 2008 YDS winners.

GO AHEAD AND START NOMINATING HERE IN THE COMMENTS! The nominations are already going strong in the comments to AudioShocker Podcast #162, so check them out and then toss out your own.

It's nice when a TV show that used to be funny and then stopped being funny gets funny again. So it has me thinking of other times when that's happened. I'd say South Park pulled off a similar trick, since it was quite funny when it first came out, but then got pretty old pretty fast--by the middle of the second season, in terms of the whole foul-mouthed 3rd-graders things. But then, in season five, the Towelie episode came out, which was hilarious, and got me to watch South Park again for a while, until it got old again. But since the Towelie episode, the show has consistently had some great episodes every season, and plenty of chunky ones. The last great peak, though, was across seasons nine and ten, between the "Trapped in the Closet" episode and "Cartoon Wars" (the latter of which finally and ultimately won me over to the South Park cause).

Sadly, The Simpsons never had a similar surge. I realize that some people have thought that The Simpsons are funny during the past decade of seasons, but the show has never returned to the heights of its 3rd-7th Seasons. There was some talk of a resurgence a couple of years ago, but that seemed, again, more like a decision made by over-zealous fans that are over-educated and don't like it when TV points out how mindless and lazy they are as middle-class consumers, who then decided that, damn it, The Simpsons was funny again. So that they could feel better about watching The Simpsons instead of, I don't know, voting.

What I've been wishing for a while now is that somehow those direct-to-dvd American Pie spin-off movies would suddenly become hilarious. I mean, it was a long time ago that American Pie came out, but I remember it being pretty genuinely funny. And it always seems like direct-to-dvd should have the kind of culture in the States that it has in Japan (or, more correctly, that I presume that it has in Japan, based on watching, like, three direct-to-DVD movies from Japan).

I'm still hoping there's more examples of shows that went from good to bad and then back to good again (maybe SNL counts, when one of its cast gets funny for a couple shows before sucking again?), but I'm guessing they're mostly going to come from the ranks of basic cable networks, since mostly, once I think gets old, it gets put out to pasture. On the DVD commentary track to the Simpsons episode where Sideshow Bob follows the Simpson/Thompson family to Cape Fear (or whatever it was called, is that what it was called?), the commentators point out that in that joke where Bob steps on the rakes for such a long time, there's this balance where the gag is funny for a couple takes, then stops being funny, but then, once it goes on for way too long, becomes extremely hilarious. And so maybe that's really the phenomenon here: these shows are still just hitting the same beats, and have managed to stick around long enough that the repetition of the same shit over and over again has gotten funny again.

Is it just me, or was this show popular because people like Mad Men and Breaking Bad so much? Like, people want so badly for there to be good programming on cable television, that they just will themselves into believing that a show which is mediocre at best is one of the great achievements of contemporary televised entertainment. Now, I like zombies as much as the next person, and I think there are probably are interesting things to be said about the current trend of putting the "geist" back into "zeitgeist," but, having gone ahead and jumped on this bandwagon, and watched all six episodes of The Walking Dead, I'm mostly left scratching my head about what people see in this.

The biggest thing that I see is what South Park figured out years ago: the conservative powers that run our censorship boards don't mind grotesque violence. There's a massive double standard between censorship of violence and censorship of sex or speech acts. So zombies are pretty much the safest vehicle for cutting edge cable-TV violence, since they don't have sex and don't talk. In a lot of ways, The Walking Dead is about little more than acts of "Look what we can show on cable TV nowadays! Amazing!" It does nothing new for the zombie genre, nor for the TV drama genre, or anything else, other than there's lots and lots of rotting flesh and gun shots to human skulls. I haven't read the comic book, but I presume a lot of the flat-ness of the zombie mythology is they fault of the book, and not the TV show.

Again, there are probably interesting questions to ask about zombies, so maybe this show was an excuse for zombie nerds to talk about zombies? I'm not really a zombie nerd. I don't really want to talk about it.

To help make it easy for you, I've created a list of all the tantalizing media we talked about in November. From Black Belt Jones to Cherry 2000 to Arrested Development (band AND show), we covered a lot of ground. Check out what we talked about and, if you decide to buy any of it, use our links to get you to the checkout!

Feeling inspired myself, I decided to write it. And seeing as how Pete published his brother's incredible fanfic (pt1 and pt2) earlier this year in Culturology, I figured this is as good a place as any to post it.

---------------

I never dreamed I'd become a major competitor, let alone make it to the top. But here I am, in Las Vegas, with stakes out the ass and money riding on my every move.

Will I trip on some errant urine in the men's room? Will I give some guy the wrong look and get my face punched in before the final round? Who knows.

But what I do know is this -- I'm Frank Castle and I'm the underdog contender for the 2010 World Arm Wrestling Championship.

The Punisher in... OVER THE TOP 2

My room is nice. They're paying for me to stay in that one hotel that looks like a pyramid. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of all the crime going on right under my nose -- brothels, card counting, dining and ditching. But that's the name of the game here in Vegas. And I've got bigger fish to fry.

Once I win the 2010 World Arm Wrestling Championship, I'll be in the inner circle. I can trace the bookies and bets all the way back to the top and find the guy that funded the drugs that my wife and kids used to shoot up uncontrollably for 24 hours a day for two years straight.

They told me they wanted to stop, damn it!!! They told me they would quit!!! But everyday I'd see them with those fucking needles in their arms and that black tar heroin smeared all over their lips. FUCK!!!

Anyway, back to the arm wrestling. See, I saw this movie called Over the Top a few years ago. It's a Stalone flick. You ever see it? It rules. Point is, it's fucking Stalone fucking arm wrestling and kicking ass. You ever see Rambo? That was awesome too.

So I decided I wanted to take it over the top. Yeah, I know my kid wasn't kidnapped or anything, but screw it. I have this grudge about my dead family and I hate criminals and I've got this fake ID with the name Moose Bullworth on it, so I figured why not give it a shot, right?

And now it's time for me to get ready for the final match.

----

Two hours of meditation followed by five minutes of masturbation and I'm ready to go. I ate a Hungry-Man TV dinner and I feel like a million bucks. I'm gonna take it OVER THE TOP tonight!

I step out onto the stage and the crowd goes nuts. They love my stylized skull t-shirt and my rugged good looks. They're clapping and yelling "DEAD MAN! DEAD MAN!" as I walk out, trying to intimidate my competitor before he even sets foot on the stage. This is amazing.

Then my opponent comes out of the shadows and I'm shocked. The audience wasn't yelling for me... they were yelling AT me! She's a 7' tall amazonian piece of she-meat, green from head-to-toe and wearing a purple bathing suit. What in the shit is going on???

Her name tag says "Jennifer" on it. This can't be right -- I never signed up to get my arm crushed by a roid-freak goddess parading around in her underwear! I wanted to feel the sweaty sting of man moisture on my palms as I slammed his hand against the mini-mat. THIS WASN'T PART OF THE DEAL!!!

Whatever. It doesn't matter. I can still win. I'm the goddamn Punisher and I'm gonna punish her.

----

She gets her elbow lined up and ready to rock. PSSSHH. Amateur. I've been ready for two minutes.

I'm ready to fight, ready to win. I'm gonna win.

I grip her hand hard and show her what I'm made of. Damn, she's got big fingers. Like thick little green sausages. I could eat one of them right now, I'm so fucking hungry to win. I'd just bite it off and suck the goopy irradiated green blood out of it like the cream filling in a Twinkie. FUCK.

The ref shouts "START!" and we push our hands together, our arms bristling with the exhilaration of competition. The audience cheers us on. Actually, no. They just cheer her on. But what do I fucking care? I'm the Punisher, damn it.

I fight hard. Real hard. But things are looking down. She's stronger than me and she's got more energy. But I'm ready... ready to take it OVER TH--

WHAT!?! What's she doing??? NOOO!!!! That's my move! She's realigning her fingers, starting out with the index finger and slowly rewrapping her grip over top of my hand. SHE'S TAKING IT OVER THE TOP!!!

How could this happen to me? Did she see that movie too? C'mon! NO ONE SAW THAT FUCKING MOVIE! It's my favorite movie, not hers! I'm out to kill the heroin-daddy that slaughtered my family with his addictive smack! I'm ready to kill in the name of American freedom! This can't be happening to me!!!

I feel a pop in my right elbow. It's sort of liberating, really. I can give up now. My bone begins to tear through the skin as I start to black out. There's blood oozing onto the floor and the crowd is going nuts. She says "Eat it, dickwad!!! I just took it over the top!" right before I hit the ground.

----

I wake up to see her standing over me, the crowd silent now. She tore off my skull t-shirt and wrapped it around my arm to slow the bleeding.

"Frank Castle, you're under arrest," she says. "You have the right to remain silent, and anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of--"

"FUCK YOU," I tell her as I spit in her face.

"You wish," she says with a smile and a wink.

Oh well... I gave it my best shot. I tried to take it over the top. It just didn't work out. I'm gonna go to jail for murdering thousands of evil slime trash deadbeat hustler criminals and cleaning up the streets of New York. I make it safe for these ants to live their meaningless stupid little lives and what thanks do they show me? They wanna lock me up and throw away the key. What a fucked up world.

1) The mid-term elections.

2) Conan O'Brien's new show on TBS.

And boy did they both suck!

I've written before about late night television, and tuning back into Conan's new show confirmed the conclusion I came to back in Culturology #55:

One thing I don't feel bad about is Conan O'Brien losing his job. I think I stopped really caring about late night TV just in time for that whole hullabaloo (despite my one hemi-post trying to speak of the issues there-involved).

There's obviously something spurious in my continued need to state that I don't care about something anymore, since clearly I continue to care just enough to keep bringing it up (and, Norm MacDonald should still have his own talk show, and I would watch that). So maybe this is the last time that I bother with Conan, since he's just getting more and more boring. In a way, basic cable is safer for him, since there can't really be any ratings demand.

Speaking of the mid-term elections, I don't think there's a better insult available in my repetoire right now then "You are a Republican!" So, now that Conan isn't funny anymore (now that I'm not 17 anymore), I feel like he must be a Republican. Jon Stewart stopped being funny, what, five years ago? Republican. Does your television show involve sitting at a desk? Republican.

I think Teabaggers probably hate and distrust most not-totally-obviously-insane-and-bigoted television personalities, but I think, basically, if you're on television, than you're a Republican. Even if you're a Democrat, or "liberal," or whatever, if you're on TV then you're basically a Republican. There was some thing on the internet the other day about some Republican-minded survey group releasing a list of what shows Democrats watch versus what shows Republicans watch. But, sorry kids, all TV is right-wing TV.

And though this guy is an industry insider, his claims seemed to genuinely be coming from the perspective of a lover of music. So his sadness at the democratization of music via internet-enabled music sharing and publicizing comes because this new system is not producing music that he thinks is good. Goodness, as I've discussed in the past, is an impossible thing to peg down, but it most boils down to having a justifiable rationale for believing that something is good or not. This is how, for instance, I can still respect Nick even though he likes terrible movies; generally speaking, he can say why he likes a thing, or I can more or less estimate, based on various trends I've witnessed across the past decade, why he thinks what he thinks is good.

So here's our industry insider's problem: like many people his age, he learned/decided what goodness was during the hey-day of 70s album rock, and his idea of goodness involves a band being able to sell out an arena, and greatness involves being not only able to sell out said arena, but also to be able to do that for several consecutive nights. And arena rock is perhaps, a true victim of the internet. Since bands (new bands) don't make that leap to arenas anymore, since they don't get enough fans, since fans, thanks to the internet, have too many choices between too many bands.

The basic argument goes like this: once upon a time, several major record labels had the machinery and infrastructure in place to give a band a chance to record an album, to disperse that album to several million fans over night, and then to put that band on a national or global tour, playing shows in front of tens of thousands of people every night. This system then generated enough capital to fund the putting on of the band's next album-tour extravaganza. Without the money generated by the music industry, bands cannot be as good as they used to be, because they can't afford good equipment, studios, engineers, or even the time to properly record an album and then take it on tour. And the bands that do manage to be good, despite their lack of resources, do not play shows to sold out arenas. If you don't play shows to sold out arenas, you are not great. Thus, we can only, in contemporary times, have nostalgic outings to arenas to see the great bands of yesteryear, as they remind us that once upon a time, there was a time called the 70s, and the 70s were great.

It's a similar argument to one that's also being had amongst book-loving people about what the role of the big publishing houses should be, and to what extent independent and especially self-publishing systems should be trusted and utilized. The music industry, even this outsider would admit, treated most of its acts like machines and commodities. But is this abuse of our popular musicians worth it in order to make the best possible music? Will indie labels and the internet ever produce any arena rockers? Certainly, independent record labels now have the infrastructure in place to nurture and support relatively large and popular acts, but is it at the sacrifice of the epic awesomeness of an arena show? Can the indie methodology continue to scale up? Should it?

I had a moment yesterday, having finished doing some work that felt good, where I flashed onto my on-going self-imposed famine from most things American-pop-cultural, and allowed myself some serious self-congratulation. Partially because I have not for a moment been bored since removing regular internet connection, television, newspapers, magazines, comics, and radio from my regular on-goings. Also, since the beginning of August (since coming over to Berlin), I have been living without a personal music-listening device. I have music on my laptop, which I listen to regularly when in my room with my laptop, but I have neither an iPod nor a portable CD player. I, as has been documented here before, have never had an iPod--remain fervently anti-Pod--but up to this point in my life, since first receiving a Discman for Christmas when I was 12 (along with a boxed-set of Weird Al Yankovic's music to that point (up through "Jurassic Park")), have always had a personal CD player handy, and have always traveled with one.

But, it turns out that the technology that facilitates my anti-Podism is backwards compatible! I so despise iPod culture that I've decided to do away with listening to music on ear bud headphones while doing any of the following activities: flying, walking around, running errands, riding trains, subways, and buses, or using my laptop in public places. This has worked out pretty well so far. My biggest test were two 13 hour train rides to and from Budapest. But never has a 13 hour train ride felt so short!

These devices have their upsides, I admit, and there's definitely been moments where I've wanted to hear music that I would have had with me had I bring CDs along, but don't have since I don't have their .mp3 representations on my laptop. And for sharing music with others, the devices are nice (that's come up a couple of times now). And, for instance, the other day I went and saw Black Mountain play, and they were incredibly awesome, so I would've liked to buy their new album, but I didn't have anything here to play it on! So maybe, some day, I will break my fast from these devices, and use them (again or for the first time), but with an increased awareness as to how unnecessary they are. I think everyone should try this. Since when were we supposed to constantly be able to listen to music anyway?

I don't really like to be this self-congratulatory, but I guess it comes along with the territory of being a cultural elitist, and especially being a cultural elitist with a long-running and multi-variegated series of acutely incisive bursts of cultural criticism (har har har). I need someone like Weird Al to show up and parody this bullshit for me, cut me down a peg or two.

Which brings up the usual problem of my really pretty thoroughly having checked out of following much pop culture at all. And I'm not quite up to the task today of giving a truly personal account of coming unplugged from mainstream culture. Except that, for instance, now I know that the American tv show The Office takes place in Scranton, PA, which I learned yesterday while doing some important research about Scranton. So that's where I'm at, culturally, dabbling here and there, but mostly wondering what's going on in Scranton. A kind of metaphorical Scranton of the heart, but Scranton nonetheless.

So once one realizes that they're in such a place--this figurative Scranton--one must then take the adjoining metaphorical coal mine tour, to really see what one has going on in the deepest recesses of one's supposed cultural vacuum. And then you realize that it's inescapable. Only with years of practice, for instance, would I be able to expunge all the Simpsons references from my worldview. I was just talking last night, in my still-far-from-fluent German about creative choice and one's mother tongue. Like, it wasn't up to me that I speak English. And my parents could have raised me multi-lingually, but they didn't. So here I am, more or less stuck with English, and sometimes bored by it, so always trying to make it interested again (or learning other languages, which can then inform back onto my mother tongue).

And in the same way, I guess once upon a time I started watching, say, The Simpsons (though I had pretty much stopped keeping up with new episodes by the time I got to college, back in 2000), but I don't really remember why. Except I thought it was funny, I guess, but I can't actually recall the day when suddenly my brothers and I became the thorough devotees that we were (though I do know that it was extremely aided by syndication, with the massive number of repeats being the ingraining force behind the total reference-making ability that I have through the first 6-7 seasons of the show). So, even if I made the choice to watch the show, I was definitely massively influenced just by syndication alone. And that hardly seems like my choice.

So there's all this cultural stuff, then, constantly replaying itself in syndication in my personal version of the zeitgeist. So then, is it ever really possible to actually fall out of touch? What if I move to Scranton?

As long time readers of Culturology (that is, Nick (and maybe Neal)) may recall, one of my favorite things about popular culture in Germany is the way they re-title movies, presumably, in order to fit in with German idiom. The classic example of this is 2008's In Bruges, which was titled See Bruges... and Die? in German. Where the English title was subtle and understated, the German title just went ahead and put it all out there. Another great example from that era (you know, back in like, 2006-2008, when movies didn't all suck?) was 3:10 to Yuma, which became, in German, Death-Train to Yuma.

So, on this trip, my most recent return to Germany, I am already defaulting to looking around to see what kind of titles foreign movies have in Germany. But it's been such a shitty year for movies that even the German titles are a let down. One exception might be Get Him to the Greek, though, as it's German title is just Man Trip. And further evidence that Germans want to be able to tell what a movie is about based on its title alone is Avatar's German sub-title, which I like to translate as Avatar: Sallying Forth to Pandora.

So why don't Americans want to know what movies are about? This of course ties in with the internet-era monstrosity that the notion of "spoiler alerts" has become. That somehow, if we know what a movie is about in any specific way, or know what is going to happen in it, then we can't possibly enjoy it. This is juvenile and foolish. So, then, even though we're the juvenile and foolish ones for feeling like the essence of a movie is (the sanctity of) its plot, it's the German titles that come off as stupid, and the Germans as the foolish ones for needing to know in simple fashion why they should bother going out to see a movie.

Though, the American movie industry still seems to make boat-loads of money despite not producing much shit that's actually worth watching, and then sometimes terrible movies (say, The Aang Legend) actually do way better abroad than they do in the States. So we're each and everyone of us--any of us with the social and financial wherewithal to go see movies at all--special little snowflakes of stupidity.

Collection and series such as Best American are great because they curate my whole experience and take the work out of subscribing to thousands of journals and blogs just to find something decent to read. I get to read across a range of authors and themes. However, as of late, I have a serious bone to pick with the editors of these collections: every story I read is depressing as hell.

Have any of you seen Wendy and Lucy? Imagine a film festival where every entry was like that.  How about an endless loop of the last 10 minutes of Nights of Cabiria and The Bicycle Thief? That's what these  anthologies seem like: a broken record of hopelessness and heart ripping grief.

I know that some amount of conflict is necessary to drive a story. Obviously a 100% positive narrative would not make a compelling story - but why does every anthologized short story that I read leave me with a pit in my stomach? Lee Gutkind's Becoming a Doctor, a collection of creative nonfiction written by doctors, almost had me crying myself to sleep. Three of the first five entries in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories made me feel so dejected that I lost my appetite.

In my high school Spanish class, we read a lot of Mexican literature, There too, all the stories followed the same pattern: tragedy besets family (vital livestock/family member dies), youth goes on a journey to better his circumstances, tragedy befalls youth again, tragic end. I wish I could find the book we used so I could quote some of the examples to you, but I recall one story where a cow was killed by a snake, another with a recurring comparison of a man's hands to worms, a long drawn out tale documenting the aftermath of a grand mothers death. There was just no positive message anywhere. In fact, these may be the most terrifyingly depressing stories ever.

Editors - I'm not asking for a cute romantic comedy (I have bittorrent for that) - but would it kill you to include a few chuckle worthy tales in your neatly collected volumes? Can't the guy get the girl every now and then? Does fire/war/pestilence/disease/CANCER have to ruin every narrative? Why even bother foreshadowing or irony when your peer authors have already extinguished any possibility of optimism?

The Bottom Line: Who decided that short stories can't end in anything less than general malaise?

But I do want to mention, I suppose to Nick & Neal, that I can take a hint, guys. How, now on the side bar, under "Current Features" I'm no longer listed on my own, but instead lumped in with "and books." Now, certainly, most of the (non-comic) book-related material on the blog comes from Culturology. But not all of it. But is there really enough stuff about books on Audioshocker that it deserves to have it's on little link there like an annoying shadow cast by the awesome obelisk of Culturology?

And well, I guess I'm not really gonna add any content other than that little snippet of griping, 'cause I don't have a whole lot else to say for myself, except that Hesse's Siddhartha, in the original German, is great reading. And South Park, dubbed into German, is a fun way to bone up on one's language skills.

...the first block i walked i only had to fight one street tough, who didnt even get in my way.  the next block i fought two street toughs, the next block i fought four.  the next block i had to fight eight, and i did some math and knew at this rate i would have serious problems.  cause they were all low level street toughs they were easy to fight, but with too many of them i was getting bruised and bloodied from getting whaled on from all sides.  plus i thought i might be hallucinating from the pain, i was seeing weird bright shapes and this nightmare version of jesus, in a purple robe like a kimono with lightning shooting out of his nail holes, he was hanging back at the outside of the fight, watching, and i didnt know yet whether he was for or against me.  so i knew i would have to face the street tough leader.

I CHALLENGE YOUR BOSS, i exclaimed.  as he emerged from the shadows of an alley i could recognize The Chief because he was so many feet taller than the rest of the toughs.  he had war tattoos all over his face and he was carrying a weapon that only a dungeons and dragons freak would know what it was, it was like an axe head at the end of a long pole.  he took off a ceremonial ninja star from a chain around his neck and threw it fast at my arm, where it shattered my japanese watch.  YOU MOTHERFUDGER, i shouted at him, not like i was losing it but just real cold, YOU DONT EVEN UNDERSTAND HOW MUCH ITS ON.

i went into a defensive crouch, i could feel my stamina was at an all time max.  The Chief charged at me and threw a body punch, i just clenched my gut and felt his hand break against my rock hard abs.  but he just laughed and fucking bent my left knee inside out with a low leg sweep.  christ that hurt, but i kept my concentration and when he thrust at me with his weapon ihead butted the pole in half.  grabbing the axe head i RAMMED IT into his collar bone, i felt it stick in the bone and i could see he was bleeding pretty bad from his aorta but he stepped back and prepared for one more onslaught.  i tried to stand up onto my left leg but the inside of my knee felt like a handful of bottle caps.  the weird shapes were whirling all around my headcackling at me.  oh man, i thought, this is looking bad but i got to stay PSYCHED TO FIGHT.

i saw the purple robe next to me and without even thinking about it, HELP ME, NIGHTMARE JESUS, i said.  without saying anything he jumped up into my arm, folding his body into the shape of a flying kick.  right when The Chief charged me i threw Nightmare Jesus full on into his face, and when the lightning from his foot stigma touched The Chief's head he torched instantly, like holding a lighter up to a dirty mattress.  when the smoke and screaming were gone all the other street toughs had run away, i knew i had beaten them for good.

i was in front of the unitarian church now, but Nightmare Jesus blocked my way to the door, and i understood that the price of his help before was that it had to be me versus him.  this was the most spiritual fighter i had ever faced and during our combat space and time lost all meaning.  i blacked out for the whole fight and dont remember a thing, all i know is when i woke up he was on the ground in front of me looking like a can of sardines someone had dumped out on the pavement.  i picked up his barbed wire crown and put it on my head, IM THE KING NOW, i said inside my mind.

i looked behind me and no opponents were left standing, just unconscious or dead bodies, and one pair of blood footprints leading from my burned out car to in front of the church.  plus the second pair of blood footprints right out front from where i had to fight the j man.  i went down into the basement.

when i limped into the octagon i knew i was too late.  the referee was about to put the division championship belt around Mad Leroy, the thousands of people up in the stands were cheering and a whole symphony was playing crowning music.  but then everyone saw me and it got completely quiet.  Mad Leroy looked at me really intense for a whole minute and, oh shit, i thought, hes going to fight me.  cause now i knew i could face anything but he was on top of his game right now, and id lost too much blood plus the one knee and most of my hand.  but then Mad Leroy just kneeled down in front of me.  everybody in the crowd and the symphony all just stood up, they didnt even cheer, it was a silent salute.

thats when i learned about myself what they were all trying to tell me.  that i was the baddest ass one just for making it there that night.  the referee put the belt around me and i felt like my heart was cracking open like an egg, and like a great mighty bird of violence and championshipness hatched out of it and filled me with its wings.  i am the one.  i can put myfoot through the whole worlds head, not anyone could stop me.  i will beat them all down.

THE END

EPILOG

a lots changed since that night of fighting last week, i know ill never have an awesomer fight so im staying out of the octagon for good.  im a sensei now, and my foot to head move that made that guys head explode in the alley is studied by all the mixed martial arts academies.  i only fight people with my mind.  and ill train any younger fighter whos strong enough, not just a strong body ... but SMART ENOUGH to know how to say ILL NEVER QUIT, ILL NEVER GIVE UP NO MATTER HOW TOUGH.

So I suck. But for those of you who pay attention to the podcast, you know that I was working at Time Inc. More specifically at Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, and People in business operations (basically all things digital). I was probably the oldest intern in the corporate internship program, one of perhaps 5 pursuing an MBA, and certainly the only one with an engineering background.

When I got the job, Nick and I both cracked up. Why? Because I'm not exactly InStyle or People's demo, my official background is in mechanical engineering, and Nick and I have had poor luck with Time Warner companies in the past. Perhaps you've read Nick's Sneaking Into Comics series about his quest for a gig at DC Comics?

The point is - total long shot! Crazy, right? Maybe not. Time Inc. digs long shots. Grady Smith, an editorial intern, made waves on the interwebs earlier this year when he posted a video on YouTube petitioning EW for a summer internship. It was awkward, rushed, and a bit manic, but it worked! You can catch up on all of Grady's summer work right here.

So what did I do? Who did I meet? What great advice can I pass on to you? Well, without totally violating the covenant of "thou shalt not blog about your internship": Free magazines are sweet! I can now flip through and process an entire issue of People in 5 minutes.

But seriously, Entertainment Weekly is a remarkably forward thinking magazine. Cyndi Stivers, the Managing Editor of EW.com, was extremely gracious and allowed me to badger her for an entire hour about how EW was approaching social media, ePub, iPads, mobile apps, her experiences at other publishers, and even silly things like captchas for comments. She and everyone else I met was genuinely excited about -- rather than scared of -- digital. The folks in digital marketing and sales are doing big things too. It's all about "what can we do?" and not "this is what we do!" Coming from engineering, I found it remarkably refreshing.

And you know what else? I have never seen more efficient 'all-call' meetings. Every Monday at 10am, the publishing staff would corral into a small conference room, turn on the speakerphone, spend 2 minutes catching up and then spend the next 28 getting down. to. business. It is a well oiled machine. Numbers, charts, recognitions, goals, new opportunities, guest presenters - everything gets covered in those 28 minutes and everyone is jazzed about it too. Efficiency consultants (and engineers) could learn something from EW's Publisher Ray Chelstowski.

But back to me! I spent the summer doing research and benchmarking for future products, new tech, expansion opportunities, and potential acquisitions. Marketing, mobile websites, apps, ads --  I looked into a lot of stuff. I also got to help test the new EW Must List iPhone app before it launched in July. If you haven't taken a look at it, you really should. It is a great example of why EW and I were a good fit, we both believe in curation.

I wrote a big long thing about this in May, and no one read it - so I'll make this easy. Thanks to the Internet, we have access (free or paid) to an infinite amount of content. Of course, not all of it is good. In fact, separating the wheat from the chaff is probably the hardest part of getting your hands on good content, and that's why you need a curator. That's why you trust specific blogs, it's why you get excited about Netflix recommendations, and it's why you need EW to find & deliver to you the best wheat. More importantly, time is money. Curation is where the money is.

If there was anything that I was frustrated by, it was "scale." Scale was the kiss of death for most of my big ideas. "How come we aren't doing promotion X? It'd really appeal to our readers!" "We don't have the scale." Perhaps, scale is certainly an important consideration in cost/benefit analysis, but it reminds me of why I was dying to get out of engineering. I was tired of hearing "No, that just isn't done." Of course, I was an intern with limited knowledge of previous endeavors and research - so scale could very well have been that important. Bottom line, I don't like how quick people were to invoke it. If you never try anything new, you'll never achieve scale either!

Obviously I made PowerPoint decks, wrote reports, read reports, compiled spreadsheets, and did a lot of Googling. All interns do that. You are never going to get out of that no matter how creative you are. I invented scrollpop/AudioShocker Shoutouts ads in my freetime, but then I went right back to updating slides. But there are some really fun things like focus groups, lunch with the CEO, brownbags with other division heads, etc that you'd never get access to outside an internship program. A big firm offers you a lot of resources that you'd be crazy not to take advantage of. (Of course, it's also easy to become a number, so watch out for that)

Now you know what I was doing for the past 9 weeks. I'm actually a little sad that I couldn't stay longer and work on more stuff. Next up? I'd like to get more into marketing, maybe at an interactive agency. Any ideas?

SUPER FOOT TO HEAD

so a while ago i kicked ass in a mixed martial arts competition, someone wrote about it in a short story called Foot To Head. i never read it cause i dont read about my own fights ... i fight them. but i know that storys nothing compared to the contest i went to last week, where i whipped so many people before i even got there. so check it out.

there were some other fighters but the big ticket item was me versus a guy called Mad Leroy for the division championship belt. Mad Leroy is just this mad, tough, tough, bad dude. he used to be an offensive tackle in this independent pro football league that was illegalized for being too intense, and you know how some guys get a barbed wire tattoo around their biceps, Mad Leroy just fucking wears a piece of barbed wire around his arm. theres rumors that he sharpens his knuckle bones and i still dont know if thats true, but one thing i do know is he is SERIOUSLY HARDCORE. that night i wanted to fight with him so bad.

first i had to get to the venue though. it should have been easy, they set up the octagon in the basement of a unitarian church near my neighborhood just twenty blocks from my apartment. normally i would have walked there but i took my car because it was extra hot that night plus i wanted to save my leg strength. but part of the way there my car got a flat tire, in the middle of this really bad neighborhood. my neighborhood and the church neighborhood are kind of bad but all right, but theres ten blocks in between that are seriously dark and evil, like the worst neighborhood youve ever imagined. FUUUUUUDGE, i shouted, i didnt really say FUDGE but i think my grandma is reading this short story because i told her it would be pretty hardcore. anyway, i said FUDGE, not because i was scared but because the flat tire was fucking up my being on time to the fight. i could have just driven on the flat but i once heard about a sensei who said face every challenge HEAD ON, NO HALFWAY MEASURES and i didnt want to bend the axle. i looked at my watch, which is always right because its a handcrafted old watch i got from an old japanese trainer who was a serviceman in wwii because i seriously beat down his nephew in a fight. the watch said i had exactly fifteen minutes to get to the octagon.

i jacked up my car and already i knew there was going to be trouble, because three street toughs were in an alley giving me the eye, and then the biggest one said to me hey little man, you having some car troubles there. ive got a slim build and i was wearing a baggy shirt but i was ripped underneath that, make no mistake, but they didnt know that. i knew there was going to be fighting cause of this electrical feeling i got. its like my brain came apart from my mind and started doing all these violence equations. two of the toughs started walking towards me on different sides and just as the first guy got too close to me i knew when to kick him in the abdomen so that he rolled over a garbage can and landed on some broken bottles. as part of the same move i wheeled around and hit the other guy with my open hand in his face, hard enough to give him something to think about later, by driving a bunch of his front teeth up into his soft palate. OH OH, LOOKS LIKE YOU FUDGED WITH THE WRONG MAN, i said to the third one, the smallest one, and he just turned and ran back into the alley. it was a blind alley, which he shouldve known, but cause he panicked i guess he didnt know anymore. too bad for him.

like i said before, the other guys short story about me was Foot To Head, i dont know why he named it that. maybe because of fighter energy flowing all the way up my body from my foot to my head or something. what i do know is this short story is Super Foot To Head because of the incredibly powerful way i put my foot to that guys head in the alley. imagine if you put three pounds of medium rare ground beef in a hollowed out honeydew melon and then shot it with a shotgun. IT WAS EPIC. when it was over i was just standing at the end of the alley breathing with busted up head meat dripping off my shirt, i was so much in the fighter zone. i looked at my watch, i had seven minutes left til the match. it was just the beginning.

when i walked out of the alley i could smell there was already more trouble cooking, cause there was an eighteen wheeler pulled up next to my car and two crooked truckers were boosting my cars tires and trying to siphon off my gas. i knew from the news earlier that there were a lot of crooked truckers on the streets that night as part of some crime wave so i was mentally prepared for them, though when the first one saw me he threw a tire iron at my head that busted my nose and only added to the challenge. it was a pretty bad hit, it was like watching a pigeon get hit by a car zero inches from my face. but the taste of my own blood only added to my anger and focus.

the other trucker dropped the siphon and came at me, i started out pretty good when i landed clean hits on him with my elbow and head. but then when i was blocking a punch he pulled out a sixteen inch jungle knife from nowhere and with a loud swish he SLASHED OFF the four fingers of my right hand. AAAUUUGGHH POOP FUDGE, i was yelling, and because i was so loud and in extreme pain the guy thought he could get away, but i grabbed his shirt with my left hand and even though it felt like sticking my arm in a garbage bag full of bees on fire i still hit him a couple times in his head with whats left of my right hand. his neck made a crunch sound like when you bite into a fresh piece of corn and as he crumpled to the ground i knew he was probably knocked out ... or worse.

the guy who threw the tire iron now was trying to get back into the truck to escape, unlucky for him im left handed though, i picked up one of the wheels on the ground they had been trying to boost. SUCK ON THIS, i yelled to him, as i chucked the wheel at him and hit him low, right where the gonads attach to the body. i had tried to hit the trucker in the mouth which would have made the suck on this line make sense, but i still horked it at him pretty good, there were pieces of his pelvis bone sticking out the small of his back when i went to make sure he was unconscious from the pain. one problem though, cause of the siphon there was gas everywhere and when the tire bounced the rim sparked on the pavement and VVROOOOM the car and eighteen wheeler ALL BURST UP INTO FIRE. NOOOOO, i said, but i still had to get out of there to get out of the way of the explosion.

now i was going to have to walk to the competition which meant fighting street toughs block after block. i could take them but it was going to be bad, cause now my right hand wasnt good for anything but hitting and cause i got some gasoline on me id have to watch out for fire. worst of all, my japanese watch told me i was already twenty minutes late for the match. i knew Mad Leroy didnt want to go home without a fight either so he wouldnt let the judges call a forfeit right away, still i had to get there quick or hed win the title by default. i thought about a different sensei from the one i talked about before though, he said IF YOU BLOCK MY WAY I WILL MAKE YOU PAY FOR THE CONSEQUENCES.

TO BE CONTINUED...

So what can we take from all this? Well, so far, two quotes in particular caught my eye:

"All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant."

This obviously appeals to the serious artist in me, as a major strain not only in my own work, but in conversations with my colleagues, is about concentration, and the value of concentration. And whether it is appropriate, in an ADD-raddled age, to still expect one's viewers/listeners/readers to, like, actually pay attention to what you've produced. This ties in to the question I was asking last week, where I was concerned that I read graphic novels too fast--that there's something there that I'm not taking the proper time to savor (I try to appreciate the art, and notice great layout and pacing when I see it, but in more standard fare, I'm often at a loss for what I should be noticing).

There's an interesting tension that arises in a lot of creative works, around repetition. I suppose especially in music and poetry, where there are refrains or formal patterns that repeat themselves. But it comes up a lot in comedy as well, via catch phrases, running gags, call-backs, etc. And even in comic books as certain frames or set-ups are repeated in certain ways to provide continuity through and across multiple books (I know that as I work on writing Time Log, I'm always looking for spots where I can set up a situation that directly mirrors another one that has already happened in the story (and maybe that really only makes sense in time travel writing, or maybe I'm just an amateurish hack (or all of these things)). But then, even once we've admitted repetition as a central element in cultural creation, some number of artists will immediately want to claim that there really is no such thing as repetition, since, as Thoreau states, change is always happening, so at best repetition is a kind of recycling uncanniness. And all of our lives are just hauntings.

"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."

And see there, isn't that nice? It sure is. But you can see that even reading just the first ten-thousand words of Walden allows me too much chance to indulge my artistic self, which is totally inappropriate for the usual wielding of the awesome cudgel of cultural criticism that I flail around with here.

But... I'm going to keep reading Walden, and dammit, I'm going to finish it eventually. I can see now how ridiculous it was to try and read this in 11th grade, on the time table of a high school English class. There's no reason to motor through this stuff! I mean, the fact that I've come around to deciding to read it myself certainly clues in the fact that I'm looking to be inspired by it (I'm trying to think of what, if anything, I was inspired by in 11th grade... maybe... you know, I don't really remember what I was reading in 11th grade, outside of stuff required for class. But I've always self-identified as a reader, so I must have been reading something...), so will probably continue to find quotes that I like.

And I think part of the problem is that I've been trying to read it as an e-book, rather than as a paperback, and that definitely isn't helping. In fact, I'll probably wind up taking the time here one of these days to go ahead and find an actual copy of the thing, 'cause then it'll be way easier to read.

Luckily I've got just the scheme to buy myself a couple more weeks to finally read it... original short fiction, written by my brother Nate, will be appearing for the next two weeks. It's a story which also serves as a great epilogue to Nick and my awesome Tournament Movie Tournament from back in the Spring. So stay tuned next week for Part I of... SUPER FOOT TO HEAD!

Which isn't to say that I do all that much consuming of youth culture. In fact, I don't really partake of any of it. Except for stuff that Nick turns me on to. Things like Avatar: The Last Airbender. Would I have been aware of the fact that Nickelodeon had made a cartoon show that was pretty good? Probably. Would I have watched it? Probably not. But, luckily, Nick had the foresight to get me to actually watch the show, and I quite enjoyed it. Not enough to read up or argue about its mythology, or to go to any comic-cons dressed up as a character or anything, but was happily watched all three seasons (and happily skipped the movie when it came out). Which brings us to this week's entry in the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub: Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese.

There is some embossed gold foil circle stamped onto the front cover of my paperback copy of this graphic novel, so I knew, even before opening it, that it must be good (it won a Young Adult Literature Prize from the ALA). Which is also nice to know ahead of time, when you've gotten a recommendation from Nick--that other people also think it's good, and it's not just another Irish Jam (not to use the same example as last week, but I've honestly blanked on any of Nick's dud recommendations (and in fact, am mostly now thinking of him giving me Casanova, which I think I might even like more than he does, so I'll let this runner die out (and start picking on Molly instead))).

And ABC is quite good. A little bit of it was kind of off-putting to me (more on that in a minute), but it does exemplify what I think must be the appeal of much YA literature, as read by actual adults (people, you know, like me, in their late twenties):

--a semi-complicated structure which then resolves itself quickly and neatly

The back-cover copy already let's us know: this book has three main characters, how are they ever going to be related? The reader will have the pleasure of finding out. And of course, the reader does find out, and rather swiftly at that (though, I have to note here, I think maybe I'm not a great reader of graphic novels; how long is it supposed to take to read a page of a comic like this? To read a whole section?). Though, in terms of these characters resolving into each other, I was a bit curious as to where the base-line reality lies in this thing. As I was talking about with The City & The City, it's often the case in fantastic tales, that it doesn't really matter how crazy the world it takes place in is, so long as that world is self-consistent. In the case of ABC, is Jin's world the same as Danny's? That is, in Danny's world, is he actually still just Jin, seeing himself as a white American kid, or did the transformation actually happen?

And, as a point of comparison, Audioshocker 2009 You-Don't-Suck-Award nominee, Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply probably stands as an example of a book with a similar structure which is resolved in a less YA-y way. The main distinction being that, though there are multiple characters that turn out to be transformed or disguised versions of themselves in other plotlines in ABC, the tale itself is told in more-or-less linear fashion, whereas in AYR, not only is there some character-crossing (some identity theft), but the tale is much more chopped up, and less obvious in its time-line (until the reader finally figures out what's going on (who is who and when they are).

--rather directly stated meanings/morals

I don't think there's anything wrong with being obvious. That's probably what makes YA literature enjoyable for grown-ups too; we don't always want to do the work of figuring out what a book is really about. The "transforming" idea, how emigration and life as a minority is always an act of transforming oneself, whether those codes come from within your community or from without, finds a happy home in the literal/actual acts of transformation undergone by these characters. So when that old lady at the herbalist early on in the story warns a young Jin about the loss of his soul and transforming, we understand it as a metaphorical turn about where one's identity comes from. And then when he actually transforms into Danny, it's given a fine fantastical resonance (as opposed to, say, the more alienating metamorphosis of poor Gregor Samsa into a giant beetle).

--a wrap it all up ending

Just for the record, it's my guess that the happy, fully concluding manner of ending literature for young people is probably a newer trend. Seems like once upon a time, authors were willing to traumatize their readers a bit more (mostly, as I look back on my own childhood (which is already too soon to get at what I'm trying to imply), I'm thinking of dead dogs here). I just wasn't thrilled with the "your best friend was my son, a monkey, and he hates humans now, so go win him back over" ending.

So, as for what I didn't like as much about this: (and this probably just reveals my usual biases) what's up with Tze-Yo-Tzuh? Or, more specifically, sending the monk and the monkey to go give gifts to Baby Jesus broke past the barriers set up by of my weak agnostic notions. Just a little much. I mean, I suppose it stands as a fine archetype of East-meeting-West, but the notion that we can get through globalized culture-mashing modern existence by recognizing that we all have the same Creator just seems... ugh, I dunno, just a little much. Given the amount of in-fighting between sects of the Abrahamaic religions alone, I don't know, I suppose I would have preferred something more secular to bring it all home with, that's all. I realize that it's a work of fantasy, but grounding it in a bit more reality at the end might also be useful to the kids that have the most to gain from reading it.

NEXT WEEK: Thoreau's Walden (and I fucking mean it!)

IN AUGUST: We'll get the month of my birth off on the right foot (to head) with some original fiction, then go from there.

Perhaps some of you--presuming that you're more-or-less my age (late 20s)--have had a similar experience to this: because of watching cartoons, as I grow older and catch up with all the culture that's happened in the past, as I see, hear, or read iconic works for the first time, I realize that I was first introduced to the trope via a reference in a cartoon from my childhood. For instance, watching the "Goodfeathers" sequences on Animaniacs, and then finally, years later, actually seeing Goodfellas, and thinking "Wow, that was a violent, vulgar (you shut your mother-father mouth!) movie, I can't believe they based a kid's show around it." Or, like, every frame from Citizen Kane, which has shown up in one place or another.

In reading Sierra Madre, I encountered the source for yet another chain of references. My personal narrative of the trope goes like this:

1) In Weird Al Yankovic's movie UHF, the pet-store guy, at some point, yells "Badgers! We don't need no stinking badgers!" Then, I believe, he throws something (some pet) out a window. This was funny.

2) In Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, the sheriff is deputizing some folks, and a bandit-esque kind of character declares "Badges! We don't need no stinking badges!" And my teenage self, smart as he was, realized that UHF was referencing Blazing Saddles.

3) This line comes from B. Traven's book! I read it with my own sub-section-of-brain-pieces-responsible-for-reading-and-comprehension!

4) I then realized that, given the first two things being movies, they were almost certainly referencing the movie adaptation of the book (starring one of those famous '40s actors), where the "Badges, we don't need no stinking badges." line must have been uttered. It comes full circle.

So that was exciting. I don't think anything else in the book matches that moment. So, if you haven't already surmised, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is Western pulp, taking place in Mexico back during the end of the oil boom and during the perhaps long-running gold if-not-boom-than-like-some-people-consistently-out-there-looking-for-gold. I haven't read a whole lot of pulp fiction in my life, and most of what I have falls into either the hard-boiled/noir genres or sci-fi, so I'm not too familiar with Western or cowboy novels. So I don't know if this one was really better than any other or not. Part of me wasn't thrilled with the prose style, mostly because it's in an omniscient third-person narration that shifts freely between characters, and also tends to be a bit pedantic.

The pedantry isn't a huge deal, since it still does tend to be pinned to one character or another, as we follow a down-and-out American as he wanders about Mexico for a while then goes mining for gold with two other Americans (one of them being an old-timer that knows the ropes). So then they're mining for gold. There's some dialogue, some gold dust, a few hi-jinks, a little bit of danger. Then they stop mining for gold. Then someone's head gets chopped off with a machete, which is a little bit jarring, since there's no other violence to match it in the book. As if the author was thinking either "Fuck it," or "Boo-yah!" I'm gonna have this guy have his head chopped off. Felt more boo-yah-ish to me than anything.

I can't tell if that just means I've been well-trained by the contemporary-literature machine to unconsciously desire Raymond Carver-esque first person narration, or if not that then the kind of distanced third person of a lot of postmodern prose, or just a modern style thing generally, but I can't think of too many books that I've read that sit in such a place narratologically. I mean, plenty of other novels do it, but not in such a sudden and free-flowing manner as the Traven. So I tried pretty hard to keep myself for judging it on such grounds, but after a while it was still hard for me to--it's not quite suspension of disbelief, but there's a kind of realism involved in any given novel, where you have to, as a reader, by it or not, as a tale being told. But since this one's a kind of morality tale, I don't know, it just seemed a bit overwrought to me. But, it being pulp, none of this matters too much, since it all moves very briskly and is delightfully easy to read.

As another note, since I'm still not finished reading Walden, one of the blurbs on the back cover (from who knows how long ago) notes that perhaps The Treasure of the Sierra Madre would take the place of Walden as the book from which the young people might take advice. Though I still feel like it's still much more likely that I go live in a shack in the woods than go mining for gold anywhere.

Coming up on the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub:

July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese

July 30th: Henry David Thoreau's Walden (this time I mean it!)

Well, I get that look a lot more than others. So here's a short list of movies that ellicit that response the most.

9. Soul Plane. Everyone I show this to agrees with me -- this movie is good.

8. Music and Lyrics. In general, I enjoy most Hugh Grant movies.

7. My Bloody Valentine. It was awesome in 3D, okay?

6. G-Force. This was also pretty awesome in 3D.

5. Muppets from Space. I think this is the best Muppet film out there, if not the best film out there.

4. Drag Me to Hell. Don't get it twisted -- this is a comedy movie.

3. Street Fighter. Again, you gotta rememeber that this is a comedy.

2. Balls of Fury. This too is a comedy movie. And a damn good one.

1. The Ladies Man. So many people thumb their nose at this and they've never seen it! Give it a chance. It's hilarious.

P.S. The Back Issue Binge is going to become a non-weekly, whenever-it's-fun-and-easy-to-meet-up sort of thing. I'll try and let you know ahead of time when it's gonna show up.

I would like to also note, though, that it isn't Walden's unreadability that kept me from reading it. Or, to restate, it's me that's the problem, not Walden. The timing just wasn't right for things to work out. Walden, we've still got a chance to make things work, I just need some more time first. My suspicion is that, in fact, I'll wind up writing about Walden's continued or renewed relevance for young people nowadays, and about how ridiculous it is to have been made to read it in 11th grade, when I was totally incapable of doing so (as I recall, I read some of the key passages, but definitely didn't read the whole thing, or if I did read it cover-to-cover, more just looked at the words, rather than actually parsing them, or I read the Cliff Notes, or the Cliff Notes were so boring that I couldn't even get through them). But I've gotta save all that writing for when I actually read the thing.

The main other cultural-digestive thing that distracted me from Thoreau was the release (and subsequent purchase (breaking a pretty consistent string of not buying media that I had going there for a while)) of a second By Brakhage anthology DVD set from the Criterion Collection. There is the part of the post where it becomes ever more painful what a nerd I am for art, but Brakhage was an amazing film-maker, and additional was an incredibly great aesthetic thinker and a brilliant reader of poetry. Combine all of that and he's been a huge influence on my own thinking about art, and especially lyric art, especially lyric poetry (which I tend not to write about for Culturology, since it's, like, rarified and probably snooty, and mostly, I imagine, uninteresting to almost everyone on the planet (and here I distinguish between poetry, which I think everyone on the planet can potentially enjoy and get a lot out of, and poetics (the theory of poetry) which is more for the poets than for the readers, in the end (even though poets, of course, are also readers))).

Brakhage is most known for his painted-on films, which are almost always silent, and which find as their inspiration closed-eye vision. Brakhage, on the various special features of the DVDs, talks about how he was really trying to make "music for the eyes." And I think, even from a popular-cultural perspective, in a lot of ways we can all see how all the arts aspire to be music. Or we have that experience, in listening to music, of finding it to be a direct line to emotional and visceral experiences in a way that happens more often and more consistently than with writing or visual art. But, before I diverge too far into talking about such things, maybe I should stop...

Brakhage is also well known because he was, for a long time, a professor of film and the University of Colorado, in Boulder. His most famous students are Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who made the original South Park short while students of Brakhage's. He also, awesomely, has a cameo role in their first movie, Cannibal: The Musical (which I haven't watched in many years, but I recall being at least entertaining, if not as laugh-packed as, say, Orgasmo). So even though Brakhage didn't really have any use for narrative sound-film, and especially not for Hollywood movies, he still managed to play a role in a couple of his students' spring break project. Which is pretty rad. I like to imagine Parker and Stone approaching him about it, and Brakhage just chuckling and amicably agreeing.

So in that way, Brakhage as a further influence on me. Even though he was a total visionary and an incredible lyric artist (and thereby, is perhaps not as immediately approachable as some artists--at least from the aesthetic conversation perspective; I think his films are very understandable), and could probably be seen as being a bit of a snoot thereby (in one of his interviews he says something awesome to the extent of "I've never seen a Hollywood movie which required more than 15 minutes at a coffee shop afterwards to discuss" (that's a massive paraphrase, and I hope I'm not misrepresenting there)), he still managed to be a cool professor and show up in a random, goofy movie. Right on.

Coming up on the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub:

July 16th: B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (this will be read by then; I'm already halfway through)

July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese

China Miéville's The City & The City

We're starting things off with a pretty awesome book this summer, I think. The City & The City came to me as a recommendation from a fiction-writing friend of mine, as a book which is blurbed as if it's a mash-up of Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka, and actually manages to do so. And that's really what it does! I found it to be a very engrossing read (perhaps more like Chandler in this way than Kafka), the sort of novel which just thrives within its genre--a detective story--to keep the plot moving, but then contains such interesting scenery. I reckon that Neal will agree about this too, since it seems like it took him all of two days to read this one. There's, I think, a fairly large number of things to discuss out of this book, so I think I'm, as a start, going to just focus on one aspect for now, and see what comes up from there: genre.

Though this book is definitely a police story at heart, it straddles this fascinating line between fantasy and sci-fi as well. Put as simply as I can, the story takes place in a city, or rather, two cities which overlap each other, Besźel and Ul Qoma, which is/are somewhere past the Balkans. Although the two cities are separate city-states, they occupy the same geographic location, they are "grosstopically" right on top of each other. Some districts are all one city or the other, but many areas "crosshatch," where the two cities co-exist, their citizens being well-trained from childhood to ignore ("unsee") the other city. The origin of this is referred to as "the Cleaving," an excellent usage of language by Miéville, as "to cleave," awesomely, means both to split, and from a separate origin, to come together (this polysemy was also beautifully utilized by the poet Li-Young Lee in his amazing poem "The Cleaving"). Monitoring transgressions by either set of citizens across these invisible borders is the mysterious force of Breach.

Breach is the more obviously sci-fi element of the story, as they wield powers which are above and beyond those held by either individual city. They're revealed to be human, in many ways, by the end of the story, but even then their technologies and observation abilities are one of the points that stretches C & C beyond just being rather realistic fantasy. The other main source for fantasy-esque elements is the possible third city of Orciny, which according to legend, exists in the cracks between the two cities, and the never-satisfyingly-explained archaeological dig in Ul Qoma that produces a mish-mash of artifacts reminiscent of an ancient culture right out of H.P. Lovecraft (though the Lovecraftian elements fizzle away very satisfyingly before any real horror elements enter the novel).

There's been a recent spate, in the last couple of years, of authors mashing genres up with detective stories, to rather satisfying results (e.g. The Big Lebowski, The Yiddish Policemen's Union (not surprisingly also, apparently, in development as a movie by the Coen brothers), Inherent Vice). I think why it works so well, and this is certainly true of The City & The City, is that the detective novel allows for both a brisk, exciting, pulpy plot but also extensive world building. The cop, Inspector Borlú, needs a city to move around in, and since he observes with such a careful eye, the reader gets a very acute observation of the alternative reality he lives in. Here I see where both this book and a lot of these genre-benders owe a lot to the rise of respect within literary circles for comics and graphic novels in the last 20-30 years.

Certainly, world-building as a concept has been around since the novel came to being (Eliot's Middlemarch, for instance, is an amazing microcosmic work), but in (traditional) novels, the impetus has been one of realism, where the world represented is supposed to match the actual world within which it is written (Middlemarch, seems to me, is pretty much exactly what life must have been like for people like that in a time and place like that). But the kind of world/universe building in comics, which seeks to create self-consistent alternate realities that don't necessarily need to have anything to do with the actual world (this is why I think The Dark Knight was such a step backwards for comic book movies, its whole Gotham-is-Chicago method takes a massive step backwards in terms of world-building, since it hinges on actualism instead of self-consistent realism (though perhaps it needed to, since Schumacher took Gotham to such campy places in his movies)).

But The City & The City succeeds so well as a novel, that although at various points I did find myself thinking that it could be really well done as either a movie or a graphic novel, I think, in the end, that it's better off without any visual representation. This way, it's up to the reader to build and interpret the wild cross-hatching streets and the two city's different architectures, fashions, and mores. There would definitely be fun ways to show and hide the two cities depending on where Borlú is, but the book itself keeps you from seeing too much, which is part of what makes the book so engrossing. The first 60 or so pages were just fun reading to me, as the police procedural took its time getting out of the gates in order to slowly sneak in exposition of the circumstances of these two cities.

And once the book really gets going, though it never loses track of its police story roots, Miéville keeps enough turns coming that it never gets stale, so that even as plot points are revealed and mysteries both pertinent to the case and cultural-historical, it still feels like there's something at stake for Borlú up through the end. Though part of me was let down by there not being a bit more Lovecraft in there, overall I came away very impressed with both the concept and execution of this one. And we're off to the races!

I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Schedule:

July 9th: Henry David Thoreau's Walden

July 16th: TBD

July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese

Back when I was in school for symphonic music, I was doing research on the composer György Ligeti, when I discovered that he had written, back in his (relative) youth, he had written a satirical piece against his home government, called something to the extent of "Hungarian Military March," and given the non-consecutive opus number of 69. And that was fifty-sixty years ago.

I'm not really sure how old I was when I first realized that numbers could be funny, though I'm sure it was in the form of saying "You're number one," while flipping someone the bird, which I perhaps learned about from the movie Top Gun. Not the part about saying "you're number one," but the part about flipping someone the bird. Top Gun also being the movie that inaugurated my love of beach volleyball (that's not true; I don't like beach volleyball). Nor was I particularly good at figuring out dirty phraseology (as an example, when I was 11 or 12, I thought the phrases was "getting ahead with that girl," not "getting head from that girl"), let alone numerology (as much as I enjoy swearing, it was until I befriended Nick during college (this biography/chronology might also be bullshit) that my vulgarities stumbled down into obscenties). This is all to say that, for writing an article on a site like Audioshocker.com, this is perhaps the most notable milestone that Culturology has yet reached.

Oh... 420 is a funny number. And 4:20 is a funny time of day (twice a day!). Don't know why I was so delayed in remembering that one. Therefore, Culturology hereby decrees that 6.0869565217391304347826 (repeating) is also a funny number. Perhaps the funniest number. You can learn more about this funny number by hiring a friend to dress in this costume. "The hat has a sign reading "420/69", which adds to the costume's authenticity." Authentic indeed (meaning, surely, that the hat being worn cost 420 pounds, 69 pence). Every so often, in critical/academic circles, the discourse can get all messed up in concerns about the authenticity of a given ethos (see, say, Theodor Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity). I think if Adorno had been writing in the times of easily-purchased sexy polyester costumes, he'd have felt differently about existentialism's "radical inwardness" (if you know what I mean...).

If I have any hopes left for Culturology (and I don't, really), it's to get to a point where as many people read it as the number that it has--the next best reason for sticking by 6.0869565217391304347826 (repeating), 'cause I'm surely closer to having that number of readers than 69.

And we (I) hear in Culturology's Miami Bureau (Culturology's only bureau) should also have some other literary treats in store for you later this month as well, so it should prove to be a most not heinous summer.

But what to blog about in the meantime. It's been a lousy spring for culture. I've mostly been wrapped up between work, teaching an undergraduate creative writing class, and plotting out the upcoming (only a month and a half away!) Time Log web comic with Nick (which, by the way, is going to be awesome, if I do say so myself). I think co-writing a comic gives me some decent street cred with my students, though I'm mostly trying to teach them about the wonders of poetry these days. Why? Because you know what many of my students seem to really like? Manga. Back when I was at Carnegie Mellon, I thought it was just a nerd-college thing that people would, like, like manga. But apparently not. Even at a giant public university in South Florida with, by my count, very few nerds, manga reigns supreme.

Which is not to make any judgment on manga one way or the other. As a matter of fact, the only manga I've ever read was the complete Akira (while at CMU, as a matter of fact). And I thought it was great. I also recall, a couple of years ago now, as Nick and I were still in the process of making Time Log happen, Nick mentioning that manga was, like, really popular, and that the easiest way to get TL made would be to make it a manga (which, as you now know, didn't happen). But now my students know that 17th-19th century British poetry is way cooler than comics!

There being some compulsion which I'm missing, to try and make poetry new and vital for my students, and use even vaguely contemporary examples. But my general opinion is that any poem worth its salt makes itself new and vital again and again across time. Of course, explaining this notion to modern students isn't easy, since it seems pretty arbitrary to them why one poem and not another would be chosen. And that's actually a really valid complaint, since who cares what a bunch of old bearded white men decide what makes for good poetry? Except that canonization is an inevitable process--and one could point this out with manga, or comics in general as well. As I've stated plenty of times before, some cultural things become recognized as being good because they are good. Or because they're good for good reasons. And it's a human enterprise; we've got to take someone's word for it. It's just a matter of not taking it for granted when we do partake of canonical pieces of the culture, and be sure to actively engage it and be able to decide for ourselves if it's worth passing on in our own personal canon of recommendations.

And so, yes, I would recommend both Akira and The Prelude. And now I command you to read The City & The City!

But wait, I haven't told you what Figment is yet! Well Ok, here is the deal: Figment is an online reading and writing community focusing on young-adult literature. Short stories, poetry, novels, maybe even essays and graphic fiction in the future -- the possibilities are endless. More specifically though, we want to engage mobile users and break away from coffee shop laptop curse. Why not read a novel on your phone or write a haiku on the bus home from school? We want you to be able to participate wherever you are and with whatever you have. Figment is about high availability, a wide selection, and user participation. Figment was inspired by Japan's cell-phone novel culture, and an article published in the New Yorker by our co-founder Dana Goodyear.

We see this as a great way to connect teens to each other and their favorite authors. I really hope you will all sign up and write yourselves in.

The aphorism generally goes "don't judge a book by its cover," but it's not so much the cover that I'm judging it by, but all that there between--and not the actually words, but just their volume. The cover seems fine, and I, like many folks who were fans of the Evil Dead; movies (especially Army of Darkness, I'm a huge fan of the the "nomicon" suffix. In fact, while I'm still a resident of North Miami (affectionately called "NoMi" by some (or at least by the free shuttle bus that the city offers)), I should probably host some kind of convention, so as to call it the "NoMicon." It'll be all about North Miami: our museum of contemporary art, our library, our night life. Pretty simple. Simple enough, maybe, to call it the Haplonomicon, or "Simply North Miami."

Hopefully I won't be so busy planning the convention to not also start up the IKWYBLSB as well. So I'm still taking recommendations for what to read. Otherwise it's gonna be something like Thoreau's Walden, which I've been meaning to read (technically re-read, maybe, insofar as I think I read some of it for English class back in 11th grade (though, if memory serves me correctly, I was so bored by it that I couldn't even get through the Cliff's Notes of it)). But Thoreau's been in the air recently, at least in my (small) social circles. Seems like a thing worth doing. One of my older brother's just re-read it, and he claims that Thoreau often displays a very pleasant wit in his writing, that was certainly lost on my too-bored-for-crib-notes 16-year-old self.

And, all joking aside, I actually do find myself very pro-bookclub, in general. Maybe it comes from having taken so many literature classes, where I've gotten used to reading and discussing literature with a group of people. And bookclubs, at least ones with folks you're interested in dealing with, can take the best parts of those academic discussions and free them from the bullshit that soaks most academic discourse to the point of no longer being particularly pleasurable. I surprise myself sometimes.

What Channel is This?

Video content distribution is converging to an all-internet accessed world. Signs point to platform agnostic websites distributing video content through personal computers (i.e. Hulu), mobile devices, and most importantly, internet connected TVs. IPTVs are already on the market, and within five years, early adopters and roughly half of the early majority will have started the exodus away from traditional TV watching behavior.

IPTV’s ability to disintermediate parties between the producer and consumer, along with the FCC’s forward-looking agenda of universal access, will hasten its acceptance as well (Ed Note: my partner Trey is a lot more optimistic about Net Neutrality than I am). It is important to recognize that the opportunity to access all video content from a website, on your television, on demand, makes traditional simulcast/broadcast TV completely obsolete. Broadcast and traditional cable TV will not disappear in the near future; however, their cachet will drop substantially.

As we move toward this world, the importance of distributor (TV channel and networks) and producer brands decreases. Today, most consumers do not associate video content with its producer. They do however associate video content with certain TV channels. As this disintermediation occurs, physical channels on a cable box will no longer exist and channel ‘brands’ will slowly die as antiquated groupings of content. Over the past decade, digital video recorders, EPGs, and syndication have already begun to loosen the association between channel and content. There are several key ways that networks create value. In this new world, all of these benefits, with the exception of advertising, will be provided by a subscription video content aggregator. Ad-based distribution will likely be taken over by a market leader such as Hulu, contributing to the complete demise network loyalty and identity.

Creating Value Through Curation

As the online library of content continues to grow (professional & amateur), we can no longer see/read/hear everything. We simply don't have the time or resources to sort through everything ourselves to find what we want, or what we may like. As a result, the ability to curate content is paramount -- and users will be willing to pay for such this service.

Netflix’s curation features need improvement. Its effectiveness in generating accurate recommendations pales in comparison to systems at sites such as Pandora, Last FM, and iTunes (Genius). Being a gateway to online content presents few barriers to entry, however, it is possible to dominate and even create a winner-take-all scenario in this business, like  Google has accomplished with its search engine. What allows Google to command a 65% market share is a marginally better search algorithm. The same is true for Pandora. Even though Last.fm offers a multitude of innovative features, Pandora’s ability to classify sound and automate its curation via an algorithm is responsible for its market leading position.

If Netflix can improve this feature, it will command significant leverage, and can establish itself as the premier destination for online video content. With a sizable lead in this technology, a producer who does not distribute through Netflix risks losing potential viewers. Additionally, Netflix’s curation tool can effectively market the content better than a network or studio can with their small marketing spend, making it more profitable for producers to forgo selling their work to a network or studio, instead retaining the rights and get paid by Netflix per view. (Ed. Note, we are assuming that Netflix continues to expand and invest in the Watch Instantly streaming service / library)

To speed up the process of improving the curation function as quickly as possible, we recommend either creating partnerships with Pandora and/or Google. Partnering with Pandora would give Netflix access to pieces of their curation algorithm and the engineers who have been building this best-of-industry platform. In addition, we recommend Neflix copy the Last.fm “scrobbler” function. The scrobbler methodology archives every piece of musical content one has played on their computer or mobile device and sends this info to Last.fm’s servers. Employing a similar methodology, Netflix could more accurately curate video content by not only recognizing what someone enjoys by telling the program as it does now (active selection), but also recognizing tastes by simply consuming content (passive selection).

--

Perhaps we knew this was coming all along, but instead of Netflix we should have find/replaced with Google. Or, perhaps we aren't nearly as prescient as we thought and everyone already knew all of this. Either way, we believe that producer/consumer disintermediation and an increasing demand for curation are important considerations when determining a digital strategy.

Google TV is certainly not the first attempt at 'IPTV', but it is likely to be the most well regarded. The last thing I need is another set-top box, but I excited about IPTV and what is coming next.

As I mentioned last time, this list was originally a submission to The Greatest Black Panther Stories Ever Told contest on the Comics Should be Good! blog (see their top 10 choices for best BP stories).

As I also mentioned, my selections for #5-1 are all classic and almost all... old, one could even claim. Maybe I'm just a classic sort of guy, ya know? Or maybe -- just maybe -- the greatest T'Challa tales just happen to be in the earlier days of the character.

05. "The Client" - Black Panther v3 #1-5 (Christopher Priest left a HUGE mark on the Panther's legacy, and it all began with this clever story arc. While I love Priest's work, his BP stories -- oddly enough -- are not my favorite of his or of the character's. But I think this is his best work with T'Challa, if only because it redefined the character for a modern audience and established an enduring status quo in terms of attitude and Wakandan culture.)

04. "Panther's Rage" - Jungle Action #6-18 (Don McGregor, Rich Buckler, and Billy Graham created what I think is safe to call the most single riveting and intense Black Panther epic in the form of Panther's Rage. It's not as much fun as Kirby's solo issues or as awe-inspiring as the Sons of the Serpent arc from Avengers, but it's amazing in its sheer length of narrative -- somewhere around 200 pages of continuous story, something which was basically unheard of at 70s Marvel. I know a lot of critics have espoused the virtues of this tale, as well as creators (Dwayne McDuffie, for example). Suffice to say I agree with them all. It's awesome.)

03. "Black Panther vs. the Sons of the Serpent" - Avengers v1 #73-74 (Roy Thomas writes a masterful two-part Avengers tale with a focus on T'Challa and his battle against the supremacist group, the Sons of the Serpent. It's one of the few BP stories that I feel successfully deals with discrimination and prejudice. However, more importantly, it's expertly crafted and exciting from start to finish. The real clincher here is #73, with pencils by Frank Giacoia. Frank is best known as an inker, but his rare turn on superhero pencils is gorgeous. Need evidence? Look no further than page 18 of #73, where BP stalks New York City at night. It's an incredible montage well ahead of its time in terms of tone and layout.)

02. "King Solomon's Frog" - Black Panther v1 #1-4 (This is a bit easier to delineate than the "Water Skin" story arc if only because it has a more distinct conclusion. These four issues fill the first half of Marvel's BP vol 1 TPB by Kirby. This arc comes second in my list of favorites because it displays the genius of Kirby's original Panther concept, while taking things to the next level of action and excitement. While BP's origin in FF #52 was fun, it wasn't as thrilling as this. Before there was Indiana Jones, there was Jack Kirby's Black Panther!)

01. "Quest for the Sacred Water Skin" - Black Panther v1 #5-7 (Sometimes it's tough to draw lines between story arcs in 60s/70s Marvel, but I've decided to lump these three issues together as an arc because they deal with the over-arching theme of T'Challa's quest to find the sacred water skin hidden in the secret City of Lost Samurai. These issues are included as the second half of Marvel's BP vol 1 TPB by Kirby. Why my top choice? Because they're simply amazing. The art, the writing, and everything about them makes for an incredible read. BP versus the Yeti. BP versus the ancient Samurai code. BP and Mister Little escape from a horde of enraged katana wielders! Too bad that few BP writers since this time have capitalized on the exciting tone Kirby displayed in this short story arc.)

That's it! Hope you liked my choices. If not, write your own in the comments.

Be back here next week for the non-Top 9 start of something very special -- Project: Basement!

However, since I wrote such a grand set of justifications for my choices, I thought I'd share them as a two-part The Top 9!

Oddly enough, all the choices on this first part of the list are fairly modern, whilst all of my part two selections lean towards the classic. Coincidence or conspiracy? You be the judge!

Honorable Mention: "Enemy of the State" - Black Panther v3 #6-12 (Honestly, I don't LOVE these issues like my other choices. But I do think they're important. Why? Because they took the tone established in Christopher Priest's first BP story arc and spun it into Marvel Universe reality. The revelation that Panther joined the Avengers to spy on them is twisted and hard to stomach, but it's also fascinating. While I wouldn't recommend these issues to anyone as their first Panther read, I do feel they're great for die-hard fans.)

09. "Two the Hard Way" - Black Panther v4 #10-11 (Okay, look, there are a lot of problems with Reggie Hudlin's take on the Black Panther. But these two BP-Cage team-up issues are just plain fun. Read and enjoy! There's nothing else to it.)

08. "See Wakanda and Die" - Black Panther v4 #39-41 (Eerie, disturbing, and thrilling, Jason Aaron and Jefte Palo deliver this stunning T'Challa tale as a tie-in to the Secret Invasion event. It's hard to put into words how gripping this quick story arc is... it's one of the most morbid BP tales I can think of, and definitely puts a somber end to the more happy-go-lucky Black Panther v4 series. The art is beautiful, the writing is smart, and the characters are endearing. But not TOO endearing. Black Panther and Storm become savage defenders of Wakanda who almost seem more fit for a Marvel MAX book than this mostly all-ages BP series.)

07. "Reconstruction" - Fantastic Four v1 #544-550 (This seven-part story is often overlooked by many fans, partly because it fell under the far-too-broad Initiative banner, and partly because it was a temporary dismantling of the classic Fantastic Four lineup. But that's what makes this Dwanye McDuffie, Paul Pelletier, and Rick Magyar story so much fun! BP essentially becomes the interim leader of the FF for this story arc and leads them on a massive cosmic journey. It's a rare chance to see BP rely on others in such a serious way. It's also an opportunity to see the great Dwayne McDuffie deliver his take on the Wakandan hero. Overall, I think this is the most underrated set of issues on this list. If you like big cosmic action AND the Black Panther, then you'll dig this.)

06. "World Tour" - Black Panther v4 #19-22 (T'Challa and Storm decide to spend their honeymoon by crisscrossing the globe and making alliances with other powerful Marvel characters in light of the impending events of Civil War. This story arc actually got split as a post-wedding tale and a Civil War tie-in in terms of branding and TPBs, but if you look at the issues, it's really one four-part arc. It's Hudlin at his best with T'Challa, making him clever, diplomatic, and dignified. Manuel Garcia turns in some INCREDIBLE art work that blew my mind back when I first read this story. I know Hudlin has his detractors, but even the biggest haters would be hard-pressed to hate this entire tale. Really, the only flaw is the uneven Doom characterization in #19, which is fairly negligible in my opinion.)

Be back next week for part 2 a.k.a. the thrilling continuation to The Top 9 Greatest Black Panther Tales!!!

I do think I'll do another Summer of Booklove reading club this summer, so I'm officially accepting recommendations or requests for books to read (my own reading habits tend to take these big swings away from fiction--I'm currently in a 5-month-long span of not really reading any novels (though I've been unsteadily chipping away at Ellison's Invisible Man for most of these five months (the book is amazing, and I'm glad to finally be getting around to reading it, but for whatever reasons (again, these kind of fiction droughts that I got through are rather obscure to me), it's taking me months and months to actually read it all). Usually what happens during these spans is I start to get all self-conscious and wonder if I'm finally caving in to contemporary culture and not reading books anymore, and then, once the fiction-blockage clears itself  I read a bunch of novels real fast all in a row, and feel better again about my ability to read. So maybe it'll be book-blogging the summer months that facilitates that pattern this time around.

Speaking of books, I've also been having the interesting experience recently of greatly liquidating my book holdings. Having so many books (mostly paperbacks, incidentally) strikes me, now that I'm post-grad school as being this kind of awful grad-school thing where, even though I would like to claim that I'm above such thing, it meant something to have all these shelves of books, most of which I'd read, on display in my apartment (which one can then imagine transporting to the claustrophobic confines of some professorial office at some small liberal arts college where everyone is impressed at how well read one is). So, the obvious remedy is to get rid of all those damn books.

I'm about to be donating the remainder to a local library, but the first step in reducing my holdings was to go through and just select all the books that I didn't care about at all, then to more thoroughly go through and get rid of the books that I knew I was never going to read ever again. Pretty quickly, I amassed a pile of books on my floor that amounted to many many shelves worth. Then I went through the books that didn't make the cut, and wrote down the ISBNs of the ones that looked like they might be worth selling on the internet. From that list, I wound up posting around 40 books on the internet, many of which I've now sold (making a couple hundred bucks in the process). Then I brought a few of my (also grad-school(ing/ed) friends over to see if they wanted any of the books I was getting rid of. At first, they were shocked that I would do something so drastic as to get rid of my books (and, come to think of it, I think  I had a similar reaction a few months back when Nick announced that he was getting rid of so many of his comics (many of which I wound up with)). But once they picked through them, there were very few that they actually wanted.

Which is part of the interestingness of this phenomenon: as soon as the books were off the shelf and on the floor, they lost all of their value. The remaining books, which none of my friends wanted, and weren't worth selling on the internet, are now going to be donated to a local library, which hopefully be able to find some use for them. I haven't yet found myself missing any of the books that I've hosed, and really wonder if I ever will. Seems doubtful. It isn't precisely a cathartic exercise either though; mostly I just get this sense of satisfaction at making my self-image slightly less douche-y (slightly more cathartic was my recent sale of my half-stack (for approximately 88% of what I paid for it seven years ago), but maybe that just feels that way because I've been living off that cash ever since).

Before the cull, I had 14.5 shelves of books. I'm now down to 7. Not too shabby. Which is also to say, I've still got a shit-ton of books in my possession, but it's a much tighter collection, and more practical feeling, since it's mostly books to which I will probably actually return (or books that I still intend to read). I've also been going through the process of trying to get a rid of a bunch of my records too, in a similar way, to get my collection down from two crates to one. And would like to do the same with my CDs, but they're kind of lost-thing at this point, since I don't have any of their jewel cases, and no one wants CDs at this point (though I guess people could take them, rip them onto their computers, and then just recycle the disc?)

Why would I only write about poetry? Well, because of the continually-cultivated cultural ambivalence that I was writing about last post, whereby I no longer pretend to care about stuff that I don't care about (this also includes not following the Pittsburgh baseball Pirates this summer (though, let's face it, that's pathetically easy, since their one of the worst teams in the majors yet again this year)). And I ran out of the kind of play-time  money good for going to a lot of movies in the theater a year ago (and it's also been a rather abysmal year for movies).

So maybe that's the question that I'm getting at, between Hollywood and the Pirates: maybe I'm not really taking any kind of cultural-critical action via this so-called ambivalence, but merely acting as an unsatisfied consumer. So then, do I either a) recognize that I'm just an unhappy customer and get back to complaining about crappy shit, or b) figure out a way to genuinely ignore the entire set of machinations of the culture industry?

How to genuinely ignore the culture industry? Maybe by writing about poetry all the time instead. Of course, there's also a whole list of complications on why poetry sucks too, and I don't really want to bother with those arguments either. Gah. It's like I'm becoming negative-beyond-negative here. Maybe I just need a good book recommendation?

(And also, to end (if only parenthetically) on a positive note:  Gentlemen Broncos just gets better and better in my mind the more that I think about it. So does Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.)

Not that I have all that much to write about at this point. What I've been thinking about this week--and many of these thoughts developed last week while I was in Denver, Colorado (and neglecting to post an article) for the annual AWP conference, which puts something like 8,000 writers into one convention center and lets the fun commence. What it is that I was and am thinking about: I think, since beginning to write these articles a year and a half ago, I've been steadily trying to be less and less of a "hater" (I think the presence of Super Haters on the site has made it that much easier). Basically, I suppose, it comes down to not wanting to even bother with most of the culture that is out there and available to be engaged with in this country. Which doesn't mean that I haven't been negative about various things (especially towards hating itself, and irony-at-large), but I think that it really has given me what I would call a cultivated ambivalence towards almost all popular culture.

It came up for me in a conversation with a friend about poetry (which is to be expected), where I found myself arguing that it's good that lots of people in the country write what is essentially terrible poetry. Because the activity of poetry is better than the activity of watching television, and many other activities as well. Sure, sometimes bad poets are annoying and self-absorbed (of course, most good poets are also self-absorbed...), but the fact that they're doing poetry is a good thing. I'm not sure if I'd feel differently if poetry were more popular than it is--in fact, I think that if poetry was more popular, America would be a better place. But my friend was rather shocked at my stance, since I'm also something of an unrepentant cultural elitist, so how could I claim to support so many bad artists in their quest to make art which turns out to be bad?

Am I just being condescending? I don't mean to at all claim that my writing is any good; really, I support myself as a poet, good or bad. On some level, there's really no such thing as "good" or "bad," if one just looks at the activity taking place. For example: Capitalism is evil and destroying humanity and much of the planet's ability to support human-like forms of life. So, insofar as an activity doesn't participate in actively destroying the world, it doesn't matter what it's value-as-an-output is. So long as you write your poems in a green-friendly way (on recycled paper, with responsible ink, etc.) it doesn't matter what they say. There's nothing really to talk about, content-wise.

So, in a similar vein, admitting that there's something to talk about for products of popular corporate-sponsored culture already allows it too much sway. Hating is participatory, so already more harmful than ignorance. Which isn't to say that I haven't spent a bit of time watching television in the past handful of months, but it's been dipping steadily (and Conan leaving late night helped that out quite a bit, since that was the last time slot that I still found myself turning the tube on). The main thing that's finally pushing me to actually just getting rid of the TV that I own entirely are the increased presence in, say, the past six months, of advertisements by oil companies that basically say "oil is good, America" in a similar way as beef corporations say "beef is good, America" (it not being a coincidence that factory-farmed beef is as devastating to the environment as fossil fuels). So here's the last time I participate in admitting that there's such a thing as television advertisements. A list bit of hating: fuck you, oil companies (and an extra negative shout-out to Phil Mickelson for all those "partnering with ExxonMobil" commercials during The Masters (which I wound up watching in an airport bar while waiting for an hours-delayed flight out of Denver)--it is not okay to partner with ExxonMobil, for anything, ever).

I realize that ambivalence doesn't actually represent much, as far as oppositional behavior goes, but within the realm of "culture," it's got to be at least better than nothing. And if we can erase notions of good and bad when it comes to home-made or independently-made, or community-made cultural artifacts, realizing that most industrial culture is similarly devoid of actually identifiable qualities of value, then maybe everybody's cultural lives will get better.

Of course, the first thing I did when I got my hands on the game changer was to fire up audioshocker.com, and some other websites under the AS umbrella. Here is what I found:

nealshyam.com - looking good in the neighborhood (pure html)
stoutandporter.com - not bad baby. (WP, custom theme)
nickmarino.net - hot tranny mess (WP, customized theme)
audioshocker.com - 50% functional. (WP, customized theme)

75% of these sites run WP, and that alone should qualify them to run fairly well on the iPad - and they do. You can definitely navigate, view posts, read the main page, etc. However, without Flash the AudioShocker page is robbed of its most critical, longest running, and eponymous feature: the podcast!

I did a bit of searching for flash alternative mp3 players - and you know what - there really isn't a comprehensive alternative. The main 1pixel out player we use is simply fantastic, but that's clearly a no go. Next, up was the JW player we used to have in the sidebar. Again, no go. How about these newfangled HTML5 elements? The entire world is up in arms about streaming video from Hulu / Netflix, so clearly there must be a simple solution for audio, right? Wrong.

While there are a few javascript based options that use the new HTML5  audio tags, it just raises the latent format war between webkit browsers and Firefox. This article at html5doctor sums it up:

The most significant issue is the cross-browser implementation, where lack of a common supported audio format among browsers causes complications. If developers want to take full advantage of all browsers that support HTML 5 audio, they’ll need to create both MP3 and Ogg (and in Opera’s case, WAV) versions of the audio file they want to stream!

Funny isn't it? I usually bash Flash for being a waste of bandwidth and a crutch for lazy web designers, but perhaps I should revise my statements. Flash is still terrible for plenty of reasons, but it does allow coders to effectively write out browser incompatibility problems. I have never had to worry about the podcast player not working on someone's computer. Further, I challenge anyone to tell me, with a straight face, that they use ogg files.

There is no way on earth I am going to create (actually, there is no way Nick is going to create) three separate audio files, post them to the page using some hacked together css/html that prioritizes/uses fallbacks to trick your browser into playing the correct audio. That goes against everything the Internet stands for (easy info sharing).

Nope. WWC, Adobe, Mozilla, WebKit -- get your shit together! Either standardize rendering engines to recognize multiple formats in the audio tag, or offload all of the necessary hackery to a simple js library. I want to make the AS website HTML5 compliant as soon as possible, and this is holding me up.

But until we roll out that gimmick (and I'll consider bringing back the book club again this summer as well), I'll fall back on the facet of article writing that has, more than any other, gotten me to sixty-three blog posts in tw0-and-a-half years: slacking. It's even probably disingenuous to call these posts "articles" most of the times, and while I do stand by most of the insights that I've delivered in the past, I've mostly, especially this year, slacked it up quite a bit. I've actually got some things that I plan on writing about, but I'm sensing that I'm not actually going to get to them all (or any of them, really). As a test/motivation, I've scheduled this post to be published at 1:35p.m. Friday (already many hours late), to see if I actually manage to write it by then. If this is all you're reading, than I've failed.

But that up there isn't all that you're reading! Holy Crap! I've actually made it back to the internet before my self-assumed deadline! Crazy... So where was I?

Gentlemen Broncos.

That's right. A movie that if it played in any theaters, they weren't near me (were they all in Utah?). But I watched this a couple weeks ago now on DVD, and I tell you: definitely recommendable. I don't know that I've seen a less marketable movie in my entire life. It's the kind of movie that people like myself and my friends definitely go for, as it hits all these marks about B-fantasy and sci-fi novels, and also the movie adaptations of those novels. But Gentlemen Broncos is so unrepentantly weird and awkward that it stymies any attempt to convince non-nerds to go and see it.

A very strange movie, indeed, though, in it's willingness to follow characters that are all depressing in their own way, but somehow utterly sincere. Which is the final nail in the marketability coffin, since I would argue that GB even blocks attempts to enjoy it ironically. One either watches it and digs its vibe, or turns it off after about eight minutes.

And speaking of half-assing, Gentlemen Broncos hits its B-movie notes so precisely, that it looks like it was made by a bunch of 10 year olds with a camcorder, both in the three films-within-the-film and at the outer layer of the narrative itself. Which makes it that much more confusing. And that much better.

And with those few notes, I'm gonna go ahead and run this, hoping that Nick comments and that we can keep talking about this down in the comments section instead of me just blabbing about it here.

Kept it all rather low key, I got invited to a dinner party in Brooklyn, which was essentially catered by a chef -- red snapper. parsnip puree. duck. mushrooms. garlic. thyme. cookies. etc. it was as they say 'muy deli'.

I also got this gem of an email from OKC: Still single? Come check out your matches and find the women who want to meet you for your birthday! Click here to find your birthday matches!

Wow. You sent me an email on my birthday asking if I was still single. In what mind-bending scenario is this an appropriate question to ask someone on their birthday? What's next - asking me if I did my taxes at a family funeral? "Hey, I know you're dealing with cancer -- but did you remember to turn off the stove?" OKC, you are weird as shit.

You know how your body performs best on that circadian rhythm thing? Perhaps birthdays are the right time to make directional changes / resolutions. I don't have any fresh ones, as I am still working on those previously announced - but I'll leave you with that nugget. And this (recently discovered) awesomeness:

The year was 2001. For Pete and I, tale of Time Log had been percolating in our minds for about a year and it seemed like the right time to turn the time travel epic into a motion picture! Well, more like a bootleg 8mm class project... but a motion picture nonetheless!

There was actually more filmed footage, including a trippy (and severely out-of-focus) color scene of Pete at the base of the Stephen Foster statute before waking up in the past (and afterwards, again at the statue's base following his victory), but that footage was left on the editing room floor.

This video has been up on my YouTube account for some time now, but with a different title and sans original music. That's all been fixed, as this is now proudly re-uploaded in higher quality, branded with the Time Log name, and accompanied by the song "Uncanny" by Nik Furious, which some of you will notice as the original AudioShocker Podcast theme song.

(If you're not into reading and you want to spoil the match-up, skip to the bottom to see a bracket image featuring the WINNER.)

This is Pete, back at the helm again (though Nick and I are still tag-teaming on the post (a big thanks to Nick for all his work on the bracket images for the entire tournament)), typing directly into the "Add New Post" box of the back-end of AudioShocker. I'm so grateful to Nick for his help during this tournament, in fact, that I'm even letting his alteration of my column numbering scheme stand. What a whirlwind tournament tournament it's been! Just a couple of weeks ago there was a pile of movies all out there, fighting in their particular styles, but now we're down to a veritable Thunderdome wherein two movies enter, but only one movie leaves. Let's take another look at our finalists:

Bloodsport

It should surprise no one that this movie made it to the finals. The clear number one seed, Bloodsport is the heir-apparent to its own throne. Stripping all the unnecessary plot away from it's father-film Enter the Dragon, Bloodsport in a way really defines what the tournament movie is all about. It's about humans fighting as if they were cocks. And its about aggrandizing the myth of the star. Bloodsport, along with Kickboxer, made Jean-Claude Van Damme's career. And resident JCVD-expert Nick will confirm that the Muscles from Brussels never did better than his first real vehicle, Bloodsport. Additionally, the information that appears on the screen at the end of the movie introduced America to the-man-the-myth-the-legend Frank Dux, kumite motherfucker (or pathological fight-liar), giving Bloodsport a claim to verisimilitude unlike that of any of the other tournament movies we watched.

The Karate Kid, Part III

No one should question The Karate Kid's appearance across the mat from Bloodsport here in the final. You can question whether Part III is really better than the original. In the end, it boils down to this: while the original movie is perhaps a better movie over all, and a truly great sports movie, the final chapter of the trilogy is the better tournament movie. And you might balk at even that, since the tournament figures more prominently in the original than in Part III. But look at two crucial aspects of Part III's tournament structure that make it unique:

-- Conflict between the student and the master. In all the other tournament movies, the protagonist is out to prove the validity of his or her fighting ability, and almost always to pay homage to the training of his master. There is typically some kind of fighting-centric lesson learned (embrace all styles, there's always an out, etc.), but in KKIII, the lesson that the master is trying to impart -- that you don't have to fight at all -- is ignored and railed against by the student. The master still turns out to be right in the end, but not before having to acquiesce to the student.

-- Training with the enemy. In no other tournament does the protagonist go out and train with the bad guy. Terry Silver is an absolutely fantastic villain (B-movie stock, for sure, but nonetheless) to train with. Terry's Quicksilver Method, pernicious as it is, has remained in my own memory ever since I first saw this movie back in 1989.

These points alone show the worthiness of Part III to be in the finals. But also, the fact that the movie features two grown men trying to terrorize an (ostensibly) 18-year-old kid's life is absolutely amazing. Their entire goal is to put Cobra Kai dojos all over California, and that's about it. Efficient, gripping, amazing.

THE FINAL FIGHT

Before finally declaring a winner here, the committedly culturological side of me also needs to point something else out: Bloodsport appeared in 1988, The Karate Kid, Part III in 1989. This is no coincidence. At the root of all the American-learns-Asian-martial-art (and I use "Asian" here fully aware of the ridiculousness of the notion that we can use a single word like that to describe the great variety of cultures in that part of the world; I use "Asian" here in line with the way it's actually used in movies like Bloodsport) plots is the cultural need to come to terms with the three consecutive wars that the US waged against various Eastern foes (Japan, Korea, Vietnam), ending with the ruination-machine that was the Vietnam War. I've discussed this before, in the JCVD roundtables, so I won't belabor the point, but these movies represent the end of the span of years that Hollywood spent trying to come to terms with the Vietnam War. Most people really see this work being done by movies like Rambo, and the even-more-archetypal Missing in Action, but the tournament movies (and movies like Kickboxer) are on the same arc, if perhaps in a slightly subtler way (that's right! who'd've guessed it, that anything about a tournament movie could be subtle).

And The Karate Kid, Part III, as a decade-ending, trilogy-concluding, B-movie cashgrab, represents, in many ways the end of the Vietnam vet as karate expert genre. John Kreese and Terry Silver, buddies from the same platoon in 'Nam, help each other out, though they've both clearly been heinously scarred by their military experience, having been driven to severe mania and psychopathy. And they're terrorizing a kid that could have been their own son, had they not been stuck in a jungle halfway across the globe. Daniel LaRusso represents everything they hate about America: a spoiled kid who didn't have to fear the draft, never had to fight for his country or watch his buddies die, and -gasp- has befriended an actual Asian. And, to my mind, all of this shines through the movie despite its melodrama.

In the same way, Frank Dux represents the military veteran that has found a better way to survive the US's war history. He not only convinces a master to train him in the ways of the East, but then goes there and wins (this arc being made even clearer with the chanting of "The White Warrior" in Kickboxer), and then beats the Asians at their own game.

So the winner is...

There really is very little at stake in the Karate Kid, Part III. Sure, it sucks for the baddies that their t-shirts all get thrown back at them, and sure, Daniel LaRussa has managed to stick up for himself yet again, and maybe all us viewers learned something along the way as well. But Frank Dux in Bloodsport is fighting on behalf of an entire nation. Even though the using-the-kata-to-win ending of KKPIII is awesome in its purity (and has better final fight music), nothing can top the final fight of Bloodsport, the quivering of Jean Claude Van-Damme's not-yet-ravaged-by-fame face, the mighty power of his punch. However, if it came down, out of all sixteen of these tournament movies, to which movie I'd be most likely willing to watch at any given time, I'd have to go with The Karate Kid, Part III, because it really is the most entertaining of all these movies, the most re-watchable, the most useful as a pop-cultural reference. Is that enough, though, to grant it victory? I don't know...

thus...

The grueling battle ends with victory for: Bloodsport!

Tournament Movie Tournament WINNER:

(If you're not into reading and you want to spoil the match-ups, then skip to the bottom of this post for the FINAL ROUND bracket image.)

While I'm yet again posting this week's tourney entry, don't worry -- your ROUND THREE battle descriptions are written by your regular Culturologist, Pete. He's done watching the Pirates train for 2010, but the training camp was so bad that he's locked himself in his apartment to weep tears of desperation for the rest of the weekend.

Now on with the action:

Enter the Dragon vs. Bloodsport

Location: A bloody tournament mat in front of an audience of angry martial artists

A lot of people probably expected this to be the pairing in the FINAL ROUND of the tournament -- the mentor becomes the student, the student the kicker-of-ass. The model of the tournament has been around for a long time, historically, but it wasn't until Enter the Dragon that the tournament really came into its own as a movie plot. And so few movies since have done any better. This tournament alone featured several contenders that were really just pretenders. But then, back in those magical mid-eighties, a plucky young gymnast from Belgium wandered into a studio exec's office in Hollywood, did some impromptu kicks and splits, and Bruce Lee's greatest rival to date was born. Fitting then that the enemy in both of these movies is that baby-faced beef-cake Bolo Yeung, with all of his inexplicable arm pumping and presumably unambiguous steroid abuse.

The message of both movies is simple enough (and more Bruce Lee's than JCVD's): be open to all forms of martial arts, use your enemies methods against them, and do not trust your vision. There's plenty of arguing to be done about these movies (since they're also both exploitative and occasionally racist in their own ways as well), but we're here to answer one simple question: did Bloodsport do the tournament better than Enter the Dragon? And the answer is yes, yes it did. Bloodsport strips away so much of the unnecessary aspects of Enter the Dragon. There's no secret island, no despotic ruler, no heroin, and no slaves. Our protagonist's only goal is to win the tournament -- the only goal that a tournament movie needs!

And speaking of protagonists, as awesome as Bruce Lee is and crazy his legend, can it really compare, for sheer entertainment value, to that of Frank Dux? Did Frank Dux ever actually compete in the Kumite, let alone win it? Was he ever really in the military? Critics may gripe into the ages, but in the end, Dux's megalomania combined with Van Damme's own egocentrism give Bloodsport the extra mystical edge to take it over the top in defeating Enter the Dragon.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Bloodsport!

Redbelt vs. The Karate Kid, part III

Location: A hushed stadium full of captivated Southern Californians

Redbelt's advancement into the final four really makes a lot of sense. Coming from the well-written-by-a-well-respected-filmmaker camp of movies otherwise unfamiliar to this tournament, no one could really compete with its sharp sense of pace, crisp dialogue, and thoroughly developed main character. But now the fights have gotten serious, and can a movie about a man who doesn't want to fight really stand up against movies about characters that want to fight?

As for The Karate Kid, part III, we have a major dark-horse here. The original Karate Kid is one of the great sports movies of all time, undeniably, and a great tournament movie. But the third installment is just so amazingly over-blown that it deserved to represent the trilogy here in the final four.

Where Redbelt represents the reluctant fighter, KK3 shows us the over-anxious youth (played by a no-longer-youthful-looking Ralph Macchio) who wants to fight, wants to defend his title, despite being urged not to by his calm-minded mentor. But this also sets up the major aspect of KK3 that gives it additional interest in this tournament: the hero trains with the enemy! And the insidious "Quicksilver Method" is an absolute classic, even if most people have never even seen the film.

"You can't stand, you can't fight." The Karate Kid, part III sweeps Redbelt's leg, breaks its shin-bone in two like a piece of lumber.
"You can't breathe, you can't fight." KK3 punches Redbelt in the chest, breaking several ribs.
"You can't see, you can't fight." KK3 punches Redbelt in the face. Redbelt, its nose now broken, is blinded by its own blood.

But, of course, now the The Karate Kid, part III has that poor guy's blood all over its sweatshirt.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Karate Kid, part III!

Tournament Movie Tournament FINAL ROUND Bracket:

Be back next week to see who's declared THE WINNER!

9. To share your podcast online, you either need to get a webspace hosting plan or start a Libsyn (or other pay-for-podcasting) account. Personally, I recommend that you get a hosting plan, start a WordPress powered blog, and install the podPress plugin to broadcast your audio.

8. Get a USB mic or use your computer's built-in microphone.

7. To record your audio and edit stuff together, use Audacity.

6. In Audacity's "Preferences," make sure you're recording in mono. File size will be an issue down the line, and recording in mono will help keep the size down. (BTW, unless you're doing video, never record at 48.000 kHz -- always 44.100 kHz!!!)

5. For some compression and editing tips if you're using a Mac, check out my Podcast Pointers: Taking the Noise Out blog post. If you're on a PC, it's not quite as easy. SORRY! (But I do love the "Hard Limiter" effect for basic compression in the PC version of Audacity -- hope that helps.)

4. Export the edited audio out of Audacity as a .WAV or .AIF file and import it into iTunes.

3. In iTunes, set your "Import Settings" in "Preferences" to convert the imported audio into an mp3. Since podcasts normally run long and create large files, you have to make sure that the audio file isn't too huge. I suggest using mp3 settings of 80 kbs / 22.050 kHz / stereo channels / joint stereo mode / no smart encoding adjustments. (The joint stereo setting is important because it condenses the file size where possible!)

2. To get the audio file onto your webspace, you should probably use an FTP program (though some services will also offer the option to upload the audio for you -- just remember that the file may take some time to upload!). For FTP, I recommend using Filezilla. FTP is, of course, it's own beast if you've never used it before, but it's not that hard and there are tons of tutorials that can help you.

1. Anyway, there's A LOT more to it than that, but those are the basics. As a final step, I recommend that you look up some more tutorials to fine tune your podcasting experience. I have a somewhat-tutorial of my own on Google Knol called Creating a Podcast. Good luck and feel free to shoot me an email if you need any podcasting advice!

Why the Top 9? Because 10 is too many and 9 is better. 3 X 3 = podcasting is for lovers.

Instead, I'd like to take today's post to make a major announcement: I am quitting french fries. No more! I no longer plan to put those delectable, crunchy, death sticks down my gullet. This isn't part of some new fangled diet (i ain't going paleo!), I just need to remove this poison from my repertoire, and here are three good reasons why:

1. Fries are a garbage food. Sure, they're delicious, but what do you expect from deep fried starch laced with sodium. Fries are like wicked sirens, they call to us promising tender caresses and love. Instead, we get love handles, cholesterol, and blood sugar spikes. Homie don't play that. I'm 26, Indian, and my family history includes heart disease. I refuse to let a tuber determine my expiration date.

2. I'm poor. Fries may not cost a whole lot at a micro level, (99 cents at the low end), but waitstaff the world over continually try to upsell me on fries. With dollar menus the norm at fast food joints, a 99C fry can easily add 25% to your order. In New York, anything that looks remotely like a sandwich can be served as a "platter" (i.e. w/fries) for an additional $2.50, and it starts to add up. Fries don't make fiscal sense.

3. I can do better. I live in the Northeast. Between New Haven and NYC there is a corridor of gustatory delights. From Modern Apizza to Mamoun's Fallafels to the Bouchon Bakery - I can find better food and save up my ducats for more delicious fare such as fresh sushi or a gourmet mac and cheese. Even in the least health/finance conscious case, I would rather trade in fries for a craft beer. Not to mention, fries serve mainly as a HFCS-laden ketchup delivery tool.

Will I miss sweet potato fries? Yes. Will it be hard to always say "no i don't want to make it a 'meal'"? You betcha. But fries are evil and they will kill your body, wallet, and epicuriosity.

Fries are bad. Sermon over.

(If you're not into reading and you want to spoil the match-ups, then skip to the bottom of this post for the ROUND THREE bracket image.)

Pete's off watching the Pittsburgh Pirates training somewhere in Florida, so I'm forced to fill-in as this week's Culturology blogger. Just to spite Pete for having fun in the sun and ditching us, I've deviously taken it upon myself to switch Culturology over to the "#00" system instead of the "000" numbering. MUWAHAHAHAHA! SO DEVIOUS!!!

Now on with the tourney:

Enter the Dragon vs. The Quick and the Dead

Location: A secret Wild West desert island manufacturing compound

Herod and Han both laughed maniacally as the battle began. Their arrogance, however, was quickly their undoing as they realized that the real fight was between Bruce Lee and Sharon Stone, each waging their own cultural war. "Who will win?" they wondered. Will The Lady snap action movie gender stereotypes in two or will Lee break down the wall holding back Asian actors in Hollywood??? Unfortunately, the battle didn't last long enough to dig deep into issues of nationality, gender, and representation -- even a moron stuck in a room full of mirrors knows that the "art of fighting without fighting" is too groundbreaking and original to be topped.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Enter the Dragon!

Bloodsport vs. The Quest

Location: Vietnam

Jean-Claude Van Damme, glistening in the moonlight, stepped forward into the ring to face his cloaked opponent. He braced for the fight as his attacker threw off his cloak and revealed himself to be... Jean-Claude Van Damme!?! Shocked and confused, 1980s JCVD pushed through the pain of training and prior defeat to land a single, staggering blow against 1990s JCVD. Somewhere in the crowd, Ray Jackson could be heard yelling, "He just broke the fucking world record!" while Roger Moore was busy crying as the bookie collected on his large debt (hint: he took Moore's career).

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Bloodsport!

Redbelt vs. Sidekicks

Location: Houston, Texas

A most unorthodox fight indeed! People paid good money to see a battle to the death, but instead all they got was Chiwetel Ejiofor screaming something over and over about how there's always an escape while Chuck Norris was busy combing his hair and signing autographs off to the side. However, as Norris' ego grew more and more menacing in size, Ejiofor landed an unexpected roundhouse kick and knocked Norris senseless. Norris was defeated so quickly that the audience wasn't even sure if he was ever there to begin with...

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Redbelt!

The Karate Kid vs. The Karate Kid, part III

Location: Reseda, California

Just like the night's earlier bout between Jean-Claude Van Damme and Jean-Claude Van Damme, it looked like the older film would easily best its younger opponent. Iconic? Check. Memorable? Check. Inspiring? Check. On the books, the original Karate Kid looked like the safest bet. But that was before Terry Silver and John Kreese decided to join in on the action. Suddenly, the tables turned as a more mature Danny and his two new companions thrashed younger Danny and his high school angst. The picture soon became clear: superior storytelling and better antagonists were more than a match for the original installment. The threequel was triumphant!!!

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Karate Kid, part III!

Tournament Movie Tournament ROUND THREE Bracket:

Be back next week to see which movies clobber their way into the FINAL ROUND!

Ha! These guys get it.

One week till spring break, and you know what that means: MIDTERMS! I have finance and marketing tests this week, as well as a take home final for my leadership class. After spending 8 hours writing the most ridiculous paper on Coca-Cola, I proudly bounded out of my room and loudly exclaimed to my roommates that I had finished principle bullshittery, or the rough cut. All it needs now is a quick edit before I send it in.

I felt quite amused with myself after uttering it. And for the second time in a row, this one is not in Urban Dictionary yet. I think it really sums up the paper writing process which, as any cinematographer will tell you, is an art form.

prin·ci·pal·bull·shit·a·ry [prin-suh-pahl-bool-shit-uh-ree]

-noun

1. The phase during which a paper is mostly written, usually including large amounts of fluff. The draft is then sent for final editing or 'post': Hey Nick, I just finished principal bullshittery on my take home final, one quick edit tomorrow and I'm turning it in.

[Origin: Loosely adapted from principal photography as used in the film industry. BTW This is another AudioShocker original]

And with March, the reign of Superman begins. ELECTRIC BLUE!!! For the next couple months, everyday will see a new Tweeview of an issue (in chronological reading order) of the year that Supes spent as an energy being.

So let's let the tweets begin!!!

• #Superman 1997 19 Supes finally goes electric and it's a fun read. Honestly, this would have been a better place for me to start my reviews. 11:10 AM Mar 5th
• Gentlemen Broncos (2009) - 8/10 - Minimal indie comedy with over-the-top gross-out visuals. Would be 7 but sci-fi scenes get an extra point! 7:36 PM Mar 4th
• #Superman 1997 18 It's Supes vs Ceritak (aka Scorn)! Ceritak is from Kandor and tied into the electric powers. He annoys the hell outta me. 11:10 AM Mar 4th
• #Superman 1997 17 Things are finally picking up! Michelinie does a great job with the new electric powers as well as the Atomic Skull. 11:10 AM Mar 3rd
• #Superman 1997 16 Supes isn't electric blue yet... but a fun threat arrives in the Atomic Skull, while a Boss Moxie b-plot goes nowhere. 11:10 AM Mar 2nd
• #Superman 1997 15 I guess this is the beginning of the "Electric Blue" saga. Though it seems to launch the plot, it's a pretty MEH start. 11:10 AM Mar 1st
• JCVD (2008) - 9/10 - Smart film. Van Damme becomes vulnerable to the audience in a very conceptual way. Great plot and performance. #JCVD 4:10 PM Feb 28th
• G-Man: Cape Crisis #1-5 - 9/10 - Giarusso knocks it out of the park! G-Man is hilarious but the monsters and fantasy art are even AWESOMER. 11:10 AM Feb 28th
• #HootSuite helps me kick social media butt. http://hootsuite.com 6:29 PM Feb 27th
• The Shepard (2008) - 7/10 - An average film boosted by excellent fight choreography and the quirkiness of Van Damme's character. #JCVD 11:10 AM Feb 27th

(If you're not into reading and you want to spoil the match-ups, then skip to the bottom of this post for the ROUND TWO bracket image.)

Enter the Dragon vs. DOA: Dead or Alive

Little known fact about Bruce Lee: he was also a champion beach volleyball player (and if you told him you were looking for a slightly more "mature" attitude, his pectoral muscles would inexplicably swell to three times their normal size). Facing this overwhelmingly talented, distressingly busty version of '70s icon Bruce Lee, the shiny, comfortably 21st Century characters of DOA didn't have a chance. "Based on a video game?" scoffed Lee, "Ha. Ha ha hahha haha ha."

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Enter the Dragon!

Battle Creek Brawl vs. The Quick and the Dead

Two wildly different versions of the West butted heads in this instantly classic match-up:  a shanty-town were all the citizens like to stop-and-stare from time to time, and a Texas that is populated almost entirely by burly men. And those burly men were quite good at hugging each other and getting angry, but, well, they just couldn't do much against gun-slinging A-list Hollywood actors. Staring down her gun at a critically wounded Jackie Chan, who knelt bleeding on the ground, pleading for her to take pity and just end his life, Sharon Stone snickered and walked away, leaving Chan's barely breathing body to be picked at by the vultures that were swooping lower and lower.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Quick and the Dead!

Redbelt vs. Bronson Lee, Champion

The exploitation wizards that came up with Bronson Lee had no idea what they were in for, going up against David Mamet's well-dialogued Redbelt. Who'd of thought that one of the all-stars of contemporary theatre would also be a macho douchebag who was way into MMA? Bronson Lee didn't, and not only did he get his ass-kicked, but he was talked out of ever bothering trying to act again. Insult to injury, my friends, insult to injury. Perhaps either Charles Bronson or Bruce Lee would have stood a chance, but poor B.L. never did.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Redbelt!

Sidekicks vs. Bloodfist

This was one of the toughest matches to call in the whole first round, because both of these movies are so... uh... good! Bloodfist fared well in the early goings, as it took immediate advantage of being readily available on DVD to control the early goings of the fight. But once Sidekicks realized that its cult status, being available almost exclusively on hard-to-find VHS tapes and bootleg DVDs snapped out of its racist day-dreaming to conjure an early-nineties Chuck Norris that was still more or less in fighting form. And also, Joe Piscopo beat Billy Blanks in a swimsuit competition. Sidekicks sneaks into round two! It might just be worth watching!

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Sidekicks!

Mortal Kombat vs. The Quest

The longest, knock-down drag-out fight of the first round. Mortal Kombat came out waving around it's many shittily-animated arms, claiming re-watchability, and a superior level of Enter the Dragon knock-offery. But then Jean-Claude Van Damme ran around with some kids, took off his shirt, and did a split, and everyone in the audience, Christopher Lambert included, swooned. This one will be debated into the ages. Was it a fair fight? Were the judges biased by a bizarre, unhealthy fascination with the Muscles from Brussels? Are they rejecting all video-game based tournament movies until Marvel Vs. Capcom finally gets greenlighted? The world may never know.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Quest!

Bloodsport vs. Best of the Best

Come on people. Bloodsport wins. Duh. Bloodsport won with its eyes closed.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Bloodsport!

The Karate Kid vs. Never Back Down

One of the greatest sports movies (let alone tournament movies) ever made faces it's most successful (and not all that successful, at that) knock-off. There may well have been things about the 2000s that were okay, but Never Back Down wasn't really one of them. No contest. Way to go, Daniel-son.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Karate Kid!

Over the Top vs. The Karate Kid, Part III

We've met many people over the years that have claimed to have been entertained by Over the Top, but we don't really believe them. Meanwhile, KKPIII is a much better, way more over the top B-movie than Over the Top. It's not even time yet, in just the first round, to even sing the full praises of The Karate Kid, Part III. A sleeper candidate? A wildcard? Could be, could be...

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Karate Kid, part III!

Tournament Movie Tournament ROUND TWO Bracket:

Be back next week to see which movies fight their way into ROUND THREE!

9. José Luis Pardo

1. Jimi Hendrix

Why the Top 9? Because 10 is too many and 9 is better. 3 X 3 = SWEET RIFF, DUDE!

And starting on March 1st: A YEAR OF ELECTRIC BLUE BEGINS! I'll be tweeting a new Superman comic book review everyday for the next couple months, focusing on the year (1997-1998) when the Man of Steel gained a new look and new powers. The naming system for the reviews will follow the "triangle numbers" because that's the reading order of the issues.

Now on with the tweets!

• Until Death (2007) - 7/10 - This odd, sick plot turns highly entertaining when combined with Van Damme's performance. A great role for #JCVD 11:10 AM Feb 26th
• Donatello: The Brain Thief #4 - 8/10 - Lawson's final issue is the best. A near-silent display of solid storytelling with a twisted ending. 11:43 AM Feb 25th
• Second in Command (2006) - 6/10 - A surprisingly enjoyable and well-crafted movie. Van Damme's decent but the story shines brighter. #JCVD 11:10 AM Feb 24th
• Culturology is coming down with a case of March Madness! Next month, sixteen of our favorites will face off in a Tournament Movie Tournament 12:53 PM Feb 23rd
• Donatello: The Brain Thief #3 - 7/10 - The art excels in the close ups. The action picks up and sets the tone for the rest of the story. 11:35 AM Feb 23rd
• Wake of Death (2004) - 4/10 - Van Damme's acting is especially strong and emotional, but the plot lacks. That drags this one down. #JCVD 11:10 AM Feb 22nd
• Donatello: The Brain Thief #2 - 5/10 - Depicts a creepy, methodical title character. Good issue overall but lacks the charm of the others. 4:10 PM Feb 21st
• In Hell (2003) - 8/10 - Morbid and engaging, Jean-Claude is at his most intense since Bloodsport... only far more emotionally complex. #JCVD 11:10 AM Feb 21st
• Donatello: The Brain Thief #1 - 6/10 - Good establishing issue, showing the latest Baxter as an organic machine. Both minimal and thrilling. 11:10 PM Feb 20th

The ROUND ONE contenders:

Battle Creek Brawl: They tried to make Jackie Chan famous right after his brief appearance in Enter the Dragon. Despite flashes of his amazing charisma, it would take another decade after this movie for Chan to make it big (as big as Billy Kiss from Pittsburgh).

Best of the Best: Eric Roberts leads a team of American characters in a charge against a superior Korean Taekwondo team.

Bloodfist: Low budget fighting in the Philippines that spawned eight sequels -- more than any other movie on this list. With Billy Blanks!

Bloodsport: Jean-Claude Van Damme in the role that he never bettered, in his first and best movie. The clear favorite in the tournament.

Bronson Lee, Champion: What do you get if you cross Charles Bronson and Bruce Lee? A motherfucking champion, that's what.

DOA: Dead or Alive: Like Enter the Dragon, but with volleyball.

Enter the Dragon: The original. But is it the best?

The Karate Kid: One of the truly classic tournament movies, even if it's not as intense as the more adult fare of Bloodsport or Enter the Dragon. But can 1984's favorite plucky New Jerseyite win a whole tournament tournament in 2010?

The Karate Kid, part III: The oft-overlooked final chapter of the original Karate Kid trilogy. Most people think it went right from KK II to The Next Karate Kid, but first the Karate Kid and Mr. Miyagi had to take on some seriously menacing Vietnam veterans.

Mortal Kombat: The entirely watchable first foray into franchising the iconic video game into a filmic empire. One of the many Enter the Dragon homages in the tournament. With Christopher Lambert!

Never Back Down: Karate Kid, reinvented for douchebags in the 21st century.

Over the Top: Sylvester Stallone never speaks above a whisper (he must have been really tired when they filmed this) in this B-movie, truck-driving, arm-wrestling, father-son-bonding classic.

The Quest: Jean-Claude Van Damme is a street fighting stilt mime scamp (possibly some sort of weird child labor offender... or fetishist), forced to escape New York City and stow away on a cargo boat, where he proceeds to get caught, get saved, and get sold into martial arts slavery in Thailand. Also directed by JCVD.

The Quick and the Dead: Sam Raimi's dolly zoom wild west classic. Gene Hackman, Sharon Stone, a young Leonardo DiCaprio, and guns! What more could a tournament movie need?

Redbelt: David Mamet loves MMA. Who would've guessed? Clearly the artsy-fartsiest of the movies in the tournament.

Sidekicks: A very special vanity project for Chuck Norris, but is he really in this movie, or just a figment of our overactive imaginations?

That's the list! So now go, download the ROUND ONE bracket, and play along to see if your picks move onto ROUND TWO next Friday!

Here are the REAL reasons Teabaggers (I can't believe they actually call themselves that!) hate Captain America and always will:

9. Captain America drinks coffee, not tea.

8. On occassion, his comic book is written by radical left-wing super-liberals.

7. He was dead for the past couple years and missed the whole Sarah Palin thing.

6. His superhero partner is (or at least WAS) a social worker. HARLEM PORK BARREL POLITICS!

5. Captain America ran for president AND he watched Nixon kill himself.

4. There's a good chance that the A on his forehead actually stands for "frAnce."

3. His on-again/off-again Federal salary is just another example of out-of-control government spending.

2. That 90s Captain America movie totally sucked.

1. His shield is a circle, the same symbol liberals, gays, and cartoon lions use to describe life.

Why the Top 9? Because 10 is too many and 9 is better. 3 X 3 = Patriotic

Anyway, I figured out how to pre-schedule tweets last weekend (I know you're really excited about that... I can feel it... the energy is palpable). So I scheduled a bunch of reviews on Steel comics and Van Damme movies. And don't forget -- next week marks the end of the JCVD reviews (again, I feel the palpability)!

• Derailed (2002) - 5/10 - Despite providing fodder for Van Damme critics, this b-movie is more fun than many of his fancier flicks. #JCVD about 22 hours ago
• anyone interested in remodeling our #myspace page? let us know. we are no good at that sort of thing. 11:47 PM Feb 18th
• Superman: The Man of Steel #26 - 5/10 - Gotta love the #Steel and gun-toting Kal-El team-up! Great Steel story but a meh cliffhanger ending. 11:10 AM Feb 18th
• The Order (2001) - 3/10 - Not bad, per se... But not good either. The Charlton Heston appearance is the only memorable moment. #JCVD 11:10 AM Feb 17th
• Superman: The Man of Steel #25 - 7/10 - Lois Lane b-plot is the best thing here. #Steel plot is decent, but a little too crossover focused. 11:10 AM Feb 16th
• ok, #wale 's 'pretty girls' and 'my sweetie' tracks are pretty awesome. and yes, neal slept on that whole album due to the gaga association. 11:12 PM Feb 15th
• Replicant (2001) - 5/10 - Jean-Claude returns to his habit of dual roles in ridiculous form. Watch this only for unintentional laughs. #JCVD 11:10 AM Feb 15th
• Superman: The Man of Steel #24 - 6/10 - The story is both focused and jumpy somehow. Regardless, there's an awesome #Steel fight scene here. 11:10 AM Feb 14th
• Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2010) - 6/10 - Unique pacing and structure. The plot is a bit too simple but the action is excellent. #JCVD 12:05 AM Feb 14th
• wanted to wait to post my tweeview of the newest #JCVD film until i finished up with my others, BUT it's new so i figure i should let it rip 12:04 AM Feb 14th
• Superman: The Man of Steel #24 - 6/10 - The story is somehow both focused and jumpy. Regardless, there's an awesome #Steel fight scene here. 12:22 PM Feb 13th

Given that, as I was suspecting last week, Brubaker/Philip's Criminal is definitely worth bothering with. A full notch better than Sleeper, mostly because they both seem more at home writing a straighter noir piece, rather than having to bother with sci-fi elements. The first arc, Coward, just hits on all cylinders (and the second issue's cover is one of my favorite covers ever (and I don't normally even notice covers all that much; so maybe my immediate enjoyment of this cover demonstrates some aspect of my taste in general (I think it probably does), and thereby further clarifies why I think Criminal is better than Sleeper.

Criminal also further brings up the issue of back-matter in comics, an area of content which, to me, reached it s height with Casanova, where I can't really imagine reading the book without the back-matter; it'd still be good, but not nearly as good as I feel like it was. Criminal has some of the usual letter-responses and shout-out type material, but then also features (and I guess, again, that most of you know this, since the book isn't, like, new at all) short essays by guest writers about aspects of noir that they like, or specific movies or books that seem worth talking about. So not as personal/interwoven as the Casanova material, but definitely substantial and an aspect of reading the book in general (since the quasi-scholarly material certainly heightens the sense of genre exercise from the book).

It's a conversation that Nick and I have begun to have, as we approach the printing date of our 10-years-in-the-making masterpiece, Time Log. The story itself is enough pages that we can just print it and use the inside covers for any publishing info & thank-yous that we may need, but there's also this sense that maybe we should add another 4 pages of content, in order to have some supplementary materials. But how necessary is this? If we did so, would we just be copping an aspect of smarty-pants comics that I like and some of which appeal to Nick? Or is this what readers want in the first place? To know about all the trials and tribulations that we've been through in the last ten years in order to finally get this book in print?

I don't think that either Nick or I are particularly confessional about our craft (if you can call it craft), and I'm not sure if Shawn is or not. Plus, it would cost just that much more to print an additional four pages. But is that what we need to do to get this comic read? Or should we just run some advertisements instead...

9. Thumb Wrestling - This is a true art and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It's a game of psychological cunning and digit dexterity. Imagine the awesome closeups that'd be necessary to show this sport on TV. Riviting!

8. Chess - You would think this game of ultimate strategy would be part of the Olympic lineup, but, alas, it's been shunned. Looks like the World Chess Federation isn't nearly as methodical and plotting as they need to be if they can't even get a spot up there next to curling.

7. Cornhole - This is the youngest of these new age Olympic contenders. Frankly, this sport is probably way too frat house and tailgate right now for the Olympics, but it could ripe for the gaming.

6. Darts - Darts is to archery as ping pong is to tennis. So why not let darts go Olympic? Plus, this would actually be fun to watch on TV, I bet.

5. Billiards - It's the sport of hustlers and boring weird old people alike. Everyone from the toughest to the dorkiest can play billiards, thus making this potential Olympic competition rather interesting.

4. Butts Up - The ultimate "don't fuck it up!" schoolyard game. It's sort of like handball mixed with execution by firing squad.

3. Pillow Fighting - Is there anyone out there who hasn't had a pillow fight or some sort of equivalent battle? This might just be the most universal of all games; the ultimate lowest common denominator of sports. Plus, I think it'd be fun if there was a "slumber party" theme to the uniforms.

2. Bowling - Believe it or not, bowling isn't an offical Olympic sport. It's been a "demonstration sport," meaning it's often exhbited at the Olympic Games, but never for a medal.

1. Beer Pong - Shit, if the beer's the problem, then just call it cup pong or something else. Anyway, thanks to the USA being home to college students from across the Earth, imagine how many people the world over are now champions of this international sport??? Of course, it would be controversial... but that might actually cause people to watch the Olympics out of interest instead of "there's nothing else on TV" boredom.

Why the Top 9? Because 10 is too many and 9 is better. 3 X 3 = Olympic

And, yes (in case you were wondering), Neal even took the time to reply to his own personal Twitter feed. Now that's class!

• AXECOP ASK AXE COP 9 is UP! Axe Cop confronts an evil Rhino Man throwing rocks at kids. Please RT! http://bit.ly/dmX1KZ #axecop about 12 hours ago Retweeted by you and 27 others
• @eliopoulos haha, i was going to say "so what?!" about 13 hours ago from web in reply to eliopoulos
• @sethfronzoli i was just cleaning it up for the uninitiated. (also i def did not read the beyond thunderdome part) also: WHERE IS TINA!?? about 13 hours ago in reply to sethfronzoli
• i mean at least throw @nealrs a bone. (haha get it? a BONE) about 13 hours ago
• the audioshocker has no date for valentine's day. will you be our naughty valentine? about 13 hours ago
• @sethfronzoli the real question is: when did punk rawk kids start fiddling and riverdancing? (not to mention being organized/getting along) about 13 hours ago in reply to sethfronzoli
• @nealrs yup. pretty much. about 14 hours ago in reply to nealrs
• just watched john butler (@johnbutlertrio) perform at the @relixmag offices in #NYC. It was pretty awesome. about 21 hours ago
• @amadeuscho white shirt, Big A. it's classy yet casual. 5:00 PM Feb 11th in reply to AmadeusCho
• Desert Heat (1999) - 6/10 - I was unimpressed at first, but fond memories of Van Damme's interesting role in this film stuck with me. #JCVD 10:25 AM Feb 11th
• Superman: The Man of Steel #23 - 8/10 - Delving deeper into background of #Steel = More engaging than 1st appearance. Best of the story arc. 11:19 AM Feb 10th
• Universal Solider: The Return (1999) - 2/10 - It's so bad!!! Arrgghhh! I can't take it! Make the pain stop, Van Damme, make it stop! #JCVD 12:48 PM Feb 9th
• yo in case you didn't already notice, the AudioShocker is stepping up the tweeting. we're talking movie and comics reviews and tons more 10:06 PM Feb 7th
• Superman: The Man of Steel #22 - 6/10 - Origin of John Henry Irons as #Steel. Story has heart. Fun but not riveting. Bogdanove's art rules. 7:39 PM Feb 7th
• the swimsuit variant cover is kinda cheesy http://www.udonentertainment.com/blog/?p=1544 but UDON is right -- you should pre-order Ibuki!!! 7:59 PM Feb 6th

But now that I'm done for the moment reading novels (okay, that's not really true (I'm still in the middle of reading a (less contemporary) novel); you can take the nerd out of the library, but you can't take the library out of the nerd), I can get back to the other things that I like to read, namely, shampoo bottles comics that most people that read comics have already read. For instance, I finally just read Casanova, just in time for internet rumors that Fraction is finally working on the next arc. But, damn, that's a brilliant comic. I never really read comics as a kid, or even as a college student (got into it a little bit in college, reading stuff like Akira and other sundry technical university required readings), aside from a single issue at the barber shop where I used to get my haircut, in which Superman raced The Flash. The race was refereed by some kind of floating leprechaun guy. I forget who won, but I think it made the floating leprechaun guy unhappy. It's been a long time since I've been to the barber (though, full disclosure, I went to a Supercuts in December). So I've had a lot of catching up to do, since now that I like and read comics, I have decades and decades of catching up to do. Luckily, part of being in graduate school is having just about as much time as you'd like to have to dedicate to reading. Without getting into too much of a discussion about Casanova (because, again, I imagine that most of these conversations in the real world took place, like, a couple of years ago), I think what most impressed me about it was how it managed to feel both very unique and personal but also have a kind of broad appeal at the same time, which is a real queue (especially to a person like me, who has spent a fair amount of time here in Culturology talking about audience)). And, it probably goes without saying, but many thanks for Nick for plugging me in to just about every comic book that I've read.

Also just read Brubaker/Philips' Sleeper, which, coming after Casanova, seemed much more rooted in genre, and really kind of lacking on the sci-fi side of things. Liked the atmosphere and main character, and the global black ops kind of plot, but the superpowers seemed really pretty dull. But given the genre-related sense, I'm pretty stoked to start reading Criminal, the first five issues of which are now waiting on my table as the next thing I start reading, 'cause it seems like it pretty much has to be better than Sleeper was.

And speaking of Fraction and Brubaker, I also just read the first arc of the Last Iron Fist thingy that they co-wrote, which is pretty rad. And I'm looking forward to the next sequence, since it's apparently going to take place at a tournament, and I've just finished watching just about every tournament movie made in the last 40 years (look forward to some Tournament Movie March Madness here at Audioshocker, courtesy of Nick and myself).

And speaking of shit that's out of date, John Byrne is, like, a total asshole, right? Or am I incorrectly picking up that vibe from is early '90s Next Men effort?

Other comcis that I'm about to start reading, finally: Umbrella Academy, and Promethea.

I've also had the opportunity to read most of this stuff in single issues, rather than in their trade collections, which I think is also a massive bonus (especially with Casanova, since the book really works so well because of its back-matter). And maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I think it's really important that comics don't get sucked in to be entirely digital. Mostly because even the flimsy paper of physical comics will last longer than most digital storage mediums. And I want to be able to read comics in the case of a massive solar storm wiping out North America's power grid!

9. Motorola: Megan Fox bathing

8. Doritos: "keep your hands off my momma"

7. Kia Sorento: toy's night out

6. Bridgestone: whale in a pickup truck

5. Boost: Boost Mobile Shuffle

4. Snickers: "playing like Betty White"

3. truTV: Punxsutawney Polamalu

2. Late Show with David Letterman: Dave, Oprah, and Leno

1. Denny's: Free Grand Slam screaming chickens

Why the Top 9? Because 10 is too many and 9 is better. 3 X 3 = XLIV

What can you expect to find in our rejuvenated Twitter feed and this weekly recap? My Jean-Claude Van Damme movie reviews will be here with at least three flicks reviewed per week. Neal's taken to the format pretty quickly, and you can see that he's shouting out a lot of his favorite media.

In the future, we've got a lot of interesting and ambitious plans (hint: a year of electric blue), so watch this space every Saturday as Tweeviews continue to evolve!

• vote for figment.com - a new mobile literary community! - http://www.refresheverything.com/Figment about 19 hours ago
• shout out to @DrunkDuck, @strumhaus, and Happy Birthday to Scott Hedlund about 24 hours ago
• Knock Off (1998) - 2/10 - It pains me to say that this Jean-Claude Van Damme / Rob Schneider team-up totally sucks. Funny idea though. #JCVD 9:21 AM Feb 5th
• the audioshocker is hosted at #dreamhost btw 8:53 AM Feb 5th
• the crew is about to devour the new #sade album.  solider of love is sweeeetttt 12:15 AM Feb 5th
• Attention NYC area students! The #MBA Media and Entertainment Conference is on Feb 26th and tickets are available now! http://bit.ly/8hQ7UA 11:28 PM Feb 4th
• human target continues to be awesome. all of you (Besides @axecop and @robotthirteen) continue to suck. 11:08 PM Feb 4th
• i mean, wouldn't you? 7:25 PM Feb 4th
• @nealrs officially endorses #qdoba. 7:25 PM Feb 4th
• @suddendeath2009 sweet! 9:27 AM Feb 4th in reply to suddendeath2009
• how cool would #epub #comics be? would you download an epub comic book to read on your ipad? kindle? nook? 11:59 PM Feb 3rd
• Pride and Glory (2008) - 5/10 - A more or less not great cop movie. Colin Farrel, Jon Voight, & Ed Norton plod through 2 predictable hours. 11:55 PM Feb 3rd
• @suddendeath2009 sorry for the extremely late reply - can we get tickets to the premier? 11:52 PM Feb 3rd in reply to suddendeath2009
• audioshocker LOVES #axecop. you hear me @axecop? we LOVE YOU 11:50 PM Feb 3rd
• Legionnaire (1998) - 3/10 - Put simply: This historical epic showcases good acting by Van Damme. But it still blows. #JCVD 12:39 PM Feb 3rd
• Double Team (1997) - 1/10 - I love the fact that this movie even exists... But, unfortunately, it's pretty much unwatchable. #JCVD 8:44 PM Feb 2nd
• hmmm experiencing technical difficulties with some new Tweeview experiments... 8:44 PM Feb 2nd
• The Quest (1996) - 6/10 - It has issues, but Van Damme's directorial debut works well in a strange way, especially during the fights. #JCVD 11:47 AM Jan 30th

So what can I culturologize today? How about the fact that Avatar sucked? I guess that's not really that interesting, and a moot point, and just kind of blandly hater-ish. But such terrible writing, gah, that any time I actually managed to be sucked into it's Imax 3-D world, I was pulled right back out by the utter crap of its writing. But my favorable opinions of the continued recession-era 3-D craze continues. The future is now, people. Now now now now now (or, hmm... despite being "back with a vengeance" here at Culturology, I seem to still be half-assing it... though I feel bad about this...)

One thing I don't feel bad about is Conan O'Brien losing his job. I think I stopped really caring about late night TV just in time for that whole hullabaloo (despite my one hemi-post trying to speak of the issues there-involved). Really, now that football is over (football ended when the Steelers didn't make the play-offs and once I had already one my fantasy football league's championship game (that's right people, not only am I a hot-shit cultural critic, but I also kick ass at fantasy football)), I don't watch hardly any TV at all, except for some occasional snippets of international news on my local PBS station (German TV news on Wednesday nights!). And find myself, remarkable, having better things to do from 11:30-1:30 than watch desk-based interview television.

So let's see... what else happened... oh! I finally read (finished reading) Richard Powers's Generosity: An Enhancement, which readers might recall as my choice for the not-suck-y book of the year. It was really pretty good, definitely worthy of the prize (though I'm now reading another nominee, Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, and it's really pretty good too). Not Powers's best book, but a good book.

Alright, well, here at least, we see that Culturology is alive, if not kickin', and re-dedicating itself to getting its shit back together and having, like, real fine vintage-quality posts again soon enough.

A. I spent Saturday morning meeting noted writer Ved Mehta at his UES residence. I also met former PM of India, Inder Gujral's son and grandson. BTW, the tea was great as was the coffeecake. It was like basking in the bright sunny rays of the Indian Diaspora. And what was casting those rays you might ask? Perhaps it was master painter M F Husain's rendering of Mehta's two daughters. (My mom and sister are big Husain fans, the dude is crazy awesome. They'd kill for a MFH original). It was a rather pleasant morning. I apologize for all the namedropping, but I am continually impressed by the company my dad keeps.

B. Speaking of writers, JD Salinger died last week. I find it hard to empathize with the Twittards though, because I *gasp* never read Catcher In The Rye, nor do I feel moved to do so now. I did however see Igby Goes Down, and I am comfortable with that experience and the funny joke Kieran Culkin makes about my alma mater, Choate Rosemary Hall.

C. Groundhog Day is tomorrow, and I'll be damned if that little bastard isn't going to crap all over us with another six weeks of winter. Obviously, I'm getting a little sick of Punxsutawney P. How come he can't just pretend to not see it - or how about this: LOOK UP!? That furball has the most famous shadow ever to slank around Pennsylvania. Bill Murray should be furious that we've learned nothing from all this endless repetition. I mean come on, you KNOW he's going to see his shadow and then we'll all end up using it as an excuse for our seasonal depression.

D. There is a new ice cream spot near my place called Holey Cream, that serves a homemade donut ice cream sammich. Take a minute to comprehend that and then RUN to 9th Ave in Hell's Kitchen for your own.

E. And most importantly, Nick and I decided that the AudioShocker is going to start running ads on the site (and potentially the feed) in the near future. I know I know I know. But here's the thing, this website costs us money and we'd like to make a small fraction of that money back. We haven't picked out a formal ad scheme yet, but we are working on a rate card and we'd love to have your business. Ads will likely run in the sidebar and will be as unobtrusive as possible. Additionally, we are accepting sponsorship offers for the main Tuesday podcast. If you are interested, please email neal, nick, or audio @audioshocker.com.

To the fans, I PROMISE, ads will never change what we are about: music, movies, comics. Why? Because, media is kind of our thing. Podcasts will always be recorded in verite. Pete's columns will remain late, lame, and halfassed. Justique will continue to  put Nick in weird positions and make background noises. Nick will work even harder to find new JCVD movies. And I will never stop hating flash/vocoders.

Thanks and have a great week!

For the back story on these tales and more, check out Superhero History: War Machine.

9. Iron Man v1 #169-171 (first Rhodey as Iron Man, along with his second adventure in the Iron Man armor)

8. War Machine v1 #1-7 and 11 (first solo War Machine run minus crossovers; Rhodey leads Worldwatch)

7. The Crew v1 #1-7 (Rhodey avenges the death of his sister and makes some new friends in the process)

6. War Machine v1 #8 and Iron Man v1 #310 (first War Machine vs. Iron Man)

5. Iron Man v1 #281-283 (first appearance of the War Machine armor, worn by Tony Stark)

4. Iron Man v1 #300 and Marvel Comics Presents v1 #151-155 (introduces a street gang called the War Machines and events send Rhodey on a crusade to clean up the streets)

3. U.S. War Machine v1 #1-12 (alternate MAX continuity with a fleet of War Machines working for S.H.I.E.L.D.)

2. Iron Man: Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. #33-35 (a.k.a. War Machine: Weapon of S.H.I.E.L.D.; War Machine vs. Skrulls)

1. Iron Man v1 #284-291 (first Rhodey in War Machine armor; first Iron Man and War Machine team up)

Why the Top 9? Because 10 is too many and 9 is better. 3 X 3 = War Machine.

9. Angelina - Really, who walks out on an MTV reality show?
8. Vinny's total milquetoastness and utter irrelevance to the show
7. Ron Ron Juice - or maybe not
6. JWOWW's Battle dancing
5. GTL! GTL! GTL! - Because summer should revolve around gym, tanning, and laundry, right?
4. Snooki's hottub antics - although, someone at MTV told me that Snookin for Love is all but greenlit
3. Creepin, grenades, and grenade launchers
2. THE SITUATION
1. The Snooki punch

Why the Top 9? Because 10 is too many and 9 is better. 3 X 3 > pants.

The conference brings together the nation's top MBA students as well as media, entertainment, and related companies. The purpose is to foster informative dialogue about the film, print, music, television, sports, and publishing industries. Last year's attendance reached a record 600 MBA students. The keynote speakers this year are Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom and Janet Robinson, CEO of the New York Times.

I am organizing a panel on business development / Creating sustainable franchises and have secured several heavyweight panelists. I'd tell you all about them, but you'll just have to come to the panel. I can say that my panelists represent a certain popular TV show, a major player in comics, a giant in the live entertainment industry, and an extremely popular video game series.

And that is just mine. From venture capital to mobile media, talent management to corporate strategy, we are doing it all.

Want to know about the other 14 panels? Check it out the full list here with descriptions.

There is no press at the event, so the AS Crew won't be representing. But, as one of the organizers from NYU, I am ordering all Tristate (hell, we have kids from France coming) students to attend. Registration opens on Thursday the 28th, and it will sell out.

Instead of the typical swill about music and other inane things, let's focus on today's holiday. I recently found out that someone fairly close to me is responsible for why Carnegie Mellon University does not give it's students all of MLK day off (or at least when I attended they did not). Instead there is a half-day of 'activities' and other things planned, after AM classes. I'd apologize for this "transgression" against your party schedule, but really - how important is a day off from classes?

According the Wikipedia, labor unions proposed and championed MLK Day as a foil for another federal holiday. Bravo labor unions, way to totally use an awesome dude's assassination for your personal profit. While on the outside an admirable cause, that is nearly as underhanded as the various Hallmark Holidays we are bombarded with daily.

Of course, it doesn't matter how it got established, it is a day for us to remember Dr. King and his contributions. That's all I've got people.

8. Death at a Funeral

7. Grown Ups

6. Repo Men

5. Megamind

4. The Eagle Path

3. Tron: Legacy

2. Iron Man 2

1. I Love You Phillip Morris

Why the Top 9? Because 10 is too many and 9 is better. 3 X 3 = pants.

I feel some sense of obligation to really knock things out of the park with this post, since I asked off of Mondays and Nick & Neal accommodated within a week, but we all know that that's not necessarily going to happen.  I think, though, that by February I should really be rolling again. You've got to give me a break, Culturology is now an entire entry-year old, and a little bit prone to a wee sophomore slump here. But we soldier on.

Since Nick, I believe, has finished his massive Jean-Claude Van Damme movie watching marathon--though we may still sneak in one more JCVD Roundtable to cover the Oughts (and we also have some other awesome JCVD offshoots coming up soon)--I do still want to mention that nothing that JCVD ever did is nearly as entertaining to watch as Jackie Chan when Chan was at his peak (I'm thinking Drunken Master and Police Stories I & II here). Especially the Police Story comparison needs to be made (or even Rumble in the Bronx, for that matter) because it's the exact genre that Van Damme never managed to do as well as Jackie Chan (and Chan's amazingly-willing-to-be-injured stunt team). This ties in, more or less, with my sense that the most important part about Van Damme is that he was 1) white and 2) not American (Nick and I already discussed this to some extent in the first roundtable), since it's my sense that the boost of martial arts stars in the States, as much as it had to do with the rise of Hong Kong film-making and Bruce Lee's lasting impact, was really about the fact that the US had waged three consecutive wars against various Asian countries.

You can more or less map Edward Said's "Orientalist" readings of Victorian literature as it pertained to British imperialism (say, especially, for this case, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda) onto Kickboxer as it relates to post-Vietnam War blowback. Where JCVD, in way that Chuck Norris never could, becomes Thai (learns the "ancient ways"), but still, despite his apparent willingness to adapt to a new culture remains the "White Warrior".

As opposed to Jackie Chan, who just did awesome stunts all over the place.

+++

Also, I feel like, since I wrote about it back in the summer, I should weigh in on this whole Tonight Show situation. Of course, back in my previous post, I basically said that, excepting a few rare occasions where guests like Norm MacDonald (who should have his own talk show) or William Shatner are hilarious, Conan O'Brien had gotten incredibly boring and bland (and that, really, as Nick pointed out, Conan hadn't been really funny for a decade already). The platform probably is outmoded. So I'm not really on O'Brien's side. I watched the show last night, just to see what it was like now, what with the controversy, and Conan's interview w/ Rob Lowe was really pretty hilarious, old form for Conan. Too little, too late, I suppose.

I'm sure Bob Odenkirk wishes he was doing more, but I almost think Conan would be good in a position with some new show similar to Odenkirk's with Tim & Eric Awesome Show Good Job, where he'd be the guiding light to some comics that were doing more interesting things, obviously inspired by their mentor's glory days. (It's a suitable comparison as well because, apparently, back in the day at SNL, O'Brien, Odenkirk, and Robert Smeigel shared what was the funniest office in Manhattan at the time.) Or Conan doing weird comedy for the internet, at least, instead of bland corporate shilling for NBC (or for Fox, or where ever he ends up).

Though my guess would really be that Conan just grew up at some point and doesn't really want to work very hard any more (I'm sure he works hard to maintain his new bland self, I realize that). So I guess i still don't really care, but I'm pro-funny. Bring the funny.

Oh look, the 'user experience' people are already gathering their riotous mob and marching up to my residence. Let's get something straight, I am not saying that 'Kubrick should be enough for anyone,' (please tell me someone gets that reference). What I am saying, is that web design isn't what it used to be, and what your website looks like is less important than you think it is.

Flash
It's no secret that I have no love for Flash. What started as Macromedia's incredible new low-bandwidth ad delivery medium has become a bandwidth heavy, inescapable, behemoth. Designers use it as a crutch, choosing it over the appropriate CSS/HTML for even the simplest navigation tasks. Most web jobs require a soft mallet; Flash is a sledgehammer. (And don't get me started on the restaurant industry's collective misuse of flash and 'intro' pages)

Most blogs depend on Flash, and it is mainly used for media embeds. After all, without cute video embeds, blogs would be pretty boring. Embedding is super easy, and HD video has made fullscreen viewing enjoyable. So, as long as the video works, is anyone paying attention to the rest of the blog? Do you even look at the sidebar or footer?

RSS
Prior to 2008, I used to launch about 15 individual sites every time I opened up Firefox/Phoenix/Firebird/IE/Netscape/Mosaic/whatever. There was so much crap to sort through, so many useless elements being loaded - and everytime I hit refresh I was hoping for a new story.

Today every website on earth has an RSS feed, and the benefits are seemingly endless. I can follow upwards of 50 websites, news feeds, blogs, and webcomics without missing a beat. I haven't been to the slashdot/engadget/lifehacker front page in over two years - no more ad heavy pages or extraneous flash elements.

And let's not start crying about lost ad revenue. Several sites have successfully included ad's into their RSS feeds. I don't have the conversion rates, but these ads are short, sweet, and unobtrusive.

Granted, RSS strips out some formatting, typography, special characters and royally screws with jump/more tags - but to those who believe in it, that is a negligible price for the the benefits of aggregation. And who even clicks on jumps anyway? If you don't have a compelling first paragraph, you might as well not have written anything.

Mobile
Similiar to RSS, Smartphones have changed how we view the web. Phones have small screens and most don't do flash (yet). All the sidebars, large header graphics, etc are just reducing the viewport more and more. The best mobile sites are streamlined and spartan.

Graphics
You know those ridiculous image maps/slices that people put together instead of using typographical elements? They look cool at first, but they are another crutch that bad designers use to cover up their inability to use html properly. If you are using images of text instead of regular text, you just made life harder for your readers, because you can't easily index that text. The web is not some digital alley to be plastered with interactive movie posters. It is a medium for disseminating information effectively, cheaply, and quickly. Writing good html takes less time than making complicated graphics.

HTML 5 / CSS / whatever the kids are on about these days
I am a big CSS/HTML Nazi. I didn't start out that way, but it has truly transformed my life and coincides with my beliefs in reusable code. Well formed CSS can make even the most minimal of sites look beautiful, and on multiple platforms. (cough nealshyam.com cough)

But again, with RSS and Flash making up such a large part of the blog experience these days, how important are pixel pushers like myself? Are people even paying attention to all the work I did to center my divs/floats and get them to clear properly? No one ever says "Neal, I really like the way you designed your blog's main page."

Themes
Part of why no one cares about your design, is because you likely had nothing to do with it. How many of us use premade or the default WP themes? Kubrick (and K2!) is remarkably clean and simple, but earth shattering it is not. Flickr feeds, twitter widgets, and your blogroll are just distractions. We include them on our webpages because every other blog/theme has them, but are they contributing to our page views? Conversions? Comments? I doubt it.

And there in lies my point, your blog is defined by it's content, not by the pretty background and borders. If your blog is any good, the design is irrelevant!

The Reality
Content is king. Garbage In, Garbage Out. Even great blogs can look like crap. In fact, the savviest readers aren't even looking at your masterpiece design. So, perhaps we should focus a little less on rounded corners and a little more on coherent journalism. Knowwhutimsayin?

(And yes, I know the AudioShocker uses embeds, header graphics, and we aren't exactly build for mobile, but our writing is fantastic!)

And I had a great, what I would consider to be a classic-style culturological formulation ready and everything. I'll get it out here, and maybe add to this if/when I get the chance, should conversation not bubble off as rapidly as I think it will.

Over the weekend, I third wheeled with a friend of mine and his girlfriend to go see the new George Clooney vehicle, Up in the Air, which is a great kind of movie to third wheel on, since it's the usual brand of "indie" rom-com that uses an episodic structure and general plotlessness to come off as quirky and indie as it's been perceived as by the general-ish viewing public. A general waste of a time of a movie, except for an awesome cameo by Sam Elliot (though I missed all his dialogue because I was too busy whispering Big Lebowski quotes to my friend's girlfriend (in typical third wheel fashion)).

But here's the point I want to make, about George Clooney:

George Clooney will always be disappointing as an actor because he's constantly trying to be Jimmy Stewart when he's really--and hopelessly--James Cagney.

-

I'm asking you, AudioShocker fans to please enlighten me, because I am really in the dark here. What are we dubbing the next ten years? And for that matter, do you expect things to be any different? (I'm still waiting on that flying car, btw)

9. Twelve
8. Q
7. Urien
6. Necro
5. Elena
4. Sean
3. Yun
2. Ibuki
1. Oro

Why the Top 9? Because 10 is too many and 9 is better. 3 X 3 = Neal hates math.

9. Tales of the TMNT #64 (very excellent Mikey issue)
8. Uncanny X-Men #287 (first story where we really see Bishop's timeline)
7. Infinity War #1 (love that opening scene!)
6. Surfer Silver #35 (love the plot twist!)
5. Wet Moon 5 (love that ending scene!)
4. Gello Apocalypse (in particular, the story starting with the Charlie Brown cover)
3. Iron Man #261 (OMG! awesome parallel plot storytelling by JRjr)
2. G-Man: Cape Crisis (can't just pick one issue!)
1. Iron Man #306 (love me some Len Kaminski arc and this issue blew my mind)

Why the Top 9? Because 10 is too many and 9 is better. 3 X 3 = Neal hates math.

9. Thankskilling
8. MoH: Pro-Life
7. Teeth
6. Candyman
5. MoH: Cigarette Burns
4. Phone
3. Misery
2. Perfect Blue
1. Three... Extremes

Why the Top 9? Because 10 is too many and 9 is better. 3 X 3 = Awesome.