My name is MCA and I still do what I please

Well on and on and on and on

I can't stop y'all 'til the early morn'

So rock y'all tick tock y'all to the beat y'all

C'mon and rock y'all

I give thanks for inspiration

It guides my mind along the way

A lot of people get jealous, they're talking about me

But that's just 'cause they haven't got a thing to say

The Beastie Boys were my gateway to hip-hop, which as an uptight white boy I wasn't supposed to get into. I found rap wasn't all guns 'n' girls and got into everyone from Run-DMC to Kanye thanks to the Beasties reeling me in. "Check Your Head" and "Ill Communication" could easily be the soundtrack to my 1990s. And my favorite B-Boy was always MCA, with his battered-tires voice. There's been too much cancer in our lives lately, and at 47, MCA had a lot of good rhymes left in him. One of the greats.

Rest in Peace, MCA. Adam Yauch 1964-2012

I'll look it up in the encyclopedia

I realise that there is an awful lot of things that Peter, age 8, may never really grow up with that his dad, 40, took for granted. The notice today that the Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer produce a print edition was another one of those little milestones on the road to the future.

I remember spending an awful lot of time idly paging through my parents' old encyclopedias growing up -- a rather ancient World Book set that was so old I think Harry Truman was still listed as US President, another "newer" set that probably was out of date around 1970.

Flipping through the dusty volumes was a good occasional pastime for a bookworm kid, if I wanted to know about mining bauxite or Greek history or what classification of animal a tapir was, it was the place to go. I was never quite as obsessive as A.J. Jacobs who read every word of the Britannica in his very funny book "The Know-It-All" but it was a place to gather the bits and bobs of the world, which seemed a lot more mysterious then than now. I loved any slightly offbeat reference books, like the wonderfully esoteric "Book Of Lists" series that I read to pieces, or the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, 1982 edition, that I absorbed like a sponge.

When so much information is available so instantly today it's kind of hard to imagine those pre-Wiki days, when you had to hunt to find out things you didn't know. I don't really miss those days too much, practically speaking -- it's fabulous to be able to learn the details of the T. Rex discography from no less than a dozen or so authoritative sources online instantly, just to use one recent example. And as a journalist, the Internet is a reporter's best friend. But there is something sepia-toned and nostalgic about the way so many things we once thought were essential - a set of encyclopedias, a fancy stereo system, a rotary phone - are going away. Bookstores close and I will miss them. I'll miss the encyclopedia, in its clunky analogue way, even if I haven't actually looked at one in probably 20 years.

My childhood in the 1970s will seem as far away to Peter as he comes of age in the 2010s as the Wild West or Civil War. He was only about 4 or so when the phrase "Google it" came into his vocabulary, a true son of the Internet. Dad still has his mountains of books and actual CDs and comic books to reassure himself -- as much as I love my iPad and iPhone and iPods, I am warmed somewhere deep inside by the notion of the physical too, comforted somehow by a full plump bookshelf bristling with titles. It's not the best thing for a guy who works on the internet to admit these days, but I don't quite trust people who haven't any books in their homes.

Sir Peter Siddell, 1935-2011

My father-in-law Sir Peter Siddell died peacefully Monday, nearly three years after being diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor, and nearly two months to the day since his beloved wife Sylvia passed away.

To say 2011 has been a tough year for our family would be an understatement. To lose two parents, two grandparents, in less than 8 weeks is the kind of thing I hope nobody has to go through. The deaths were not surprises -- in many ways, we've been preparing for them for several years now. The year has been filled with slow declines, fading away and too many vigils, hospital visits and emergencies to count. There hasn't been a lot of time for blogging, or whatever passes for ordinary life.

Now all that's over. But it really is going to take us a terribly long time to get "over" losing Peter and Sylvia. I'm apparently going to be speaking at Sir Peter's funeral in Auckland Monday, and one of the things I will mention is how unceasingly welcome he was to this strange American joining his family, dragging his daughter around the USA and eventually bringing her home again.

Sir Peter was one of New Zealand's most famous painters, and it's a great comfort that he lived long enough to see his work recognized -- a wonderful coffee-table book of his art came out this year. And the family has a tremendous legacy left behind of his distinctive, uniquely Kiwi work.

Passed almost unnoticed this week was that it's been exactly five years since we moved back to New Zealand. We didn't know then what we'd be dealing with, or that our son would have such a short time with his New Zealand grandparents. But I'm still glad we've been here for it, that we were able to be a part of their lives and that my wife and her sister were so supportive in their final days.

We don't always know what kind of family we'll get when we marry someone. I was extraordinarily lucky and honored to be part of this one as long as I was.

More on Sir Peter's passing from local media:

* New Zealand Herald

* TVNZ

* Auckland Art Gallery

* Artists NZ

* Beattie's Book Blog

* Siddell Art

Steve Jobs and the world he left us

Like a lot of people, I heard the news about Steve Jobs dying via my Apple computer – in my case, my iPhone.

There’s been quite the reaction to the death of Steve Jobs, at 56, too young, and many of these comments talk about how much he “changed the world.” Despite my distaste for hyperbole, I’d have to agree. He’s one of the few business leaders you can say that about. Steve Jobs didn’t single-handedly create the home computer, the iPod or the iMac or the iPad, but he was a driving force in getting his vision across to talented others, and even more than Bill Gates, he was the face of the ongoing technological revolution. And unlike Bill Gates, Steve Jobs managed to be bloody cool.

An article I quite liked today noted how Apple “stood in the intersection of utility and desire.” That to me really sums up the instinctive appeal to the Apple line, which more than any other computer system has taken us into the future. We may not have rocket jetpacks and laser guns, but I have a computer the size of a sheet of paper and I can do video live conferencing with my parents on the other side of the world at a moment’s notice.

Apples were the first computers I liked, and the only computers I’ve ever really owned. A friend of mine in junior high had some of the first Apple IIs in the mid-1980s, which dazzled me with their ease and intuitive use, even with the poky black-and-white games. I was too danged poor in the 1990s to own anything but hand-me-down PCs but when I finally achieved fiscal stability, one of those beautiful blueberry 1998 iMacs had to be mine. Since then it’s been MacBooks, iPhones, iPods galore – and just last week, I bought an iPad 2. I’ve used PCs when I’ve had to, but I have never felt as at home, as comfortable on them as I have on my Macs.

I don’t know much about Steve Jobs the human being, who apparently could be a bit arrogant, but I do know that whatever his flaws, he drove a creative, engaging business sense that made Apple what it is today. His management style drove the innovation that kept Apple rising from the dead, again and again. Oh, and during that brief period Jobs was “fired” from Apple? He went and helped create Pixar, the home of some of the biggest computer animated movies of all time.

Sure, Apple’s business practices aren’t perfect, and the “hip” factor might put some off. But there’s a reason every other tech company scrambled to come up with their own mp3 players, their own tablets and their own smartphones that aped Apple as much as possible. It’s because somehow, Steve Jobs knew what people want. He’s gone, but he left behind a world that’s very much shaped in his image.

Harvey Pekar: 'Ordinary life is really complex stuff'

The thing about the late, great Harvey Pekar is that he saw day-to-day life could be as exciting as Batman battling the Joker. He was really the first to tap into the power of autobiographical comix, and the godfather of the work of dozens of creators like James Kochalka, Howard Cruse, Craig Thompson, Joe Matt and my ol' pal Jason Marcy. Everyone who came to realise that the ordinary world could be extraordinary.

American Splendor was kind of an ironic title for his life's work, but Pekar took us through his mundane world -- working as a file clerk, love and obsessions and cancer and pain, the whole shebang. He was an utterly unique, cranky and unpolished voice in comics at the time he began his work -- even Robert Crumb, whom Pekar collaborated with, tended toward more fantastical, surreal work rather than the grit and grunge of daily life.

I'll miss his cantankerous voice, but am glad he's left so much behind to enjoy. Start with one of the big thick American Splendor collections, and you can't go wrong with the superb 2003 movie, which in my mind is one of the most creative and thought-provoking comic book adaptations we've seen in this era of superhero overkill. Godspeed, Harvey.

Alex Chilton was a Big Star

Alex Chilton is dead, and lordy does it hurt to type those words. For a certain stripe of pop fan, he was kind of like our Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, and when I heard he'd died today at the too-young age of 59, of an apparent heart attack, I was stopped stone-cold. It's been a crappy kind of week anyway, and Alex Chilton should never die. Michael Jackson dying, yeah, kind of saw that coming, but Alex Chilton was the voice of heartbreak and strained emotion and man, he just shouldn't be dead, y'know?

I discovered Chilton's never-quite-made-it 1970s band Big Star in the 1990s, when I was living near Memphis, Tennessee, their home town. Big Star were a cult fetish for music nerds, with their blend of power pop, rock chops and lyrical truth. It's taken years, decades, for them to get their due -- the awesome box set of pretty much everything they did, "Keep An Eye On The Sky," was one of the best music albums of last year or any year, really. You listen to a Big Star song, and you think, man, why have I never heard of these guys?

Chilton's songs may never have quite topped the charts, but the best of them hit a chord with many artists - you might know "September Gurls," given a lovely cover by The Bangles, or "In The Street," which covered by Cheap Trick became the theme song for "That '70s Show." Big Star only released a couple of albums, but these '70s records are universal in their stumbling honesty. There was just something really fragile and sincere yet strong about Chilton's best work. There's been one jillion overwrought songs about being young, uncertain and in love, but somehow, Chilton's never seemed forced. His thin, quavering voice danced through tunes like "Thirteen" and "Back of a Car," finely detailed little snapshots of everyday emotional fumblings--
"Sitting in the back of a car 

Music so loud, can't tell a thing 

Thinkin' 'bout what to say 

And I can't find the lines"

Read it on the page and it sounds like generic teenage angst, maybe, but man, Alex Chilton SELLS that sentiment and if you've ever been 16 years old and digging that person so much your stomach boils, you know the feeling. Big Star and Alex Chilton touched that moment and always sold it, always made it feel real. Over their three-year recording career their songs ran the gamut from teen-bop of "Don't Lie To Me" to the dark, glistening sorrow of songs like "Holocaust." Endlessly contrarian, Chilton's post-Big Star career was a strange twisty journey -- he seemed to spurn the fame he could've had -- but he never stopped playing -- he was going to play with the reformed Big Star this weekend.

There's a tribute song by The Replacements that'll be played thousands of times by Chilton fans in coming days -- as heartfelt as any of Chilton's best, it's an homage to a cult artist who should've been a household name but never quite was, but that doesn't really matter. It's a valentine to a secret idol, a star who's huge in your own personal universe and you don't care if anyone's never heard of him. In my mind, Alex Chilton will always be a Big Star.

Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes 'round
They sing "I'm in love. What's that song?
I'm in love with that song."

Revenge of the spawn of the links

So the wife noted recently how we managed to have a relatively illness-free winter down under. Whereupon I, of course, immediately got struck down by Phlegmius, the God of Mucus. In the absence *snnork* of good health, I offer random links that amuse or intrigued me of late:

• Witness the worst celebrity wax figures ever. I love the President Obama one, who looks like an old Jim Nabors figure spray-painted black.

• Y'know, in the accolades and appreciations after the untimely death of Patrick Swayze I realised I had never seen his 1986 masterwork "Road House," in which he plays a zen bouncer who's like the Confucius of bar brawls. It is not quite as awesome as "Point Break," mainly because it doesn't costar Keanu "Whoa" Reeves, but it is still startlingly cool as a piece of '80s cheese and übermanly exuberance. Plus, throat-ripping! Pop Matters examined "the Tao of Dalton" a while back, and it makes for excellent Swayze-musing.

• I never really thought about it before, but I do dig sci-fi movie corridors! In praise of the sci-fi corridor.

• Whenever a handful of really famous people die it really, really annoys me when people talk about a "plague" of celebrity deaths or the whole "they come in threes" myth, as if famous people (and regular, non-famous plebians) didn't die every single day just because that's what people do. So I quite liked this NY Times article which looks at the real reason the media/online world seemed to constantly be freaking out about people dying this summer: The Summer of the Celebrity Deaths? Boomers realizing they're not immortal? Egad!

• I've mentioned before that Leonard Pitts is probably my favorite current newspaper columnist (close runners-up being the NY Times Maureen Dowd, who sometimes is too clever for her own good, and San Francisco Chronicle's Jon Carroll, who sometimes is too twee for his own good). Pitts manages to bring a consistently thoughtful yet genuinely concerned tone to his left-of-center observations. Anyway, this piece by Pitts is superb as he looks at what he calls "the howl of the unhinged and the entitled" we keep hearing from the US lately: The 'Culture War' is real and scary.

• Man, I grew up reading Marvel's old Star Wars comics, but I have to admit, they could be pretty wonky tales sometimes. The 11 least necessary Star Wars comic book stories. A great list from the fab Topless Robot, but where is Jaxxon the giant green bunny rabbit, darn it?

• Here's the thing -- yeah, if you're wearing a yarmulke or a turban out or the like on the streets and get hassled for it, I can see the outrage. But if you insist on being a grown-up and going out in public dressed like a Jedi Knight and then want to sue over religious discrimination -- well, you're a dork. Jedi church founder 'emotionally humiliated.'

• Finally, because we all need more Lego art: A functional cello -- made out of Lego.

A moment of silence for Patrick Swayze

I'll have more Melbourne stuff soon, but in honour of the late, great Patrick Swayze, I feel inspired to re-post a blog entry from 2005. They'll talk about your "Dirty Dancing" and they'll talk about your "Ghost," and perhaps some will speak about "To Wong Foo," but for my money, Swayze's Bodie was the best bank-robbing surfer anybody ever portrayed in any medium. Rest in peace, dude.

From 2005:

Top 20 Reasons 'Point Break' is cinematic art

1. Keanu Reeves IS... Johnny Utah, FBI agent. There has never been a finer character name.
2. Patrick Swayze as bedraggled, hair-product abusing zen hippie Bodhi, surf guru, "searcher" and bank robber extraordinaire.
3. It's John C. McGinley, cranky wisecracking authority figure Dr. Cox from TV's "Scrubs," as... cranky wisecracking authority figure FBI boss Ben Harp!
4. Johnny Utah: "I caught my first tube this morning, sir."
5. Gary Busey, insane as all hell, as Keanu's partner FBI agent and budding psychosis case.
6. The bank robbers dress up as "ex-Presidents" in rather creepy rubber masks.
7. This yields perhaps one of the coolest images ever captured on film, "Ronnie Reagan" as bank robber lighting a gas station on fire to escape his pursuer.
8. A weirdly masculine Lori Petty as perhaps the least sexy love interest ever. Her part in the sequel will be played by a leftover carpet sample.
9. The Red Hot Chili Peppers cameo to beat up Keanu!
10. Bodhi: "Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true."
11. Random lawn mower face-threatening violence!
12. Bodhi: "100 percent pure adrenaline!"
13. During an exciting foot chase sequence, an angry pit bull is thrown at Johnny Utah.
14. On the far-out Internets, you can find an entire awesome essay about Utah and Mormon church references and subtexts in "Point Break." And it's amazingly obsessive: "...the scenes with Supervising Agent Ben Harp comprise 372 lines of the script's total 6623 lines (5.6%)."
15. Because if you go to the IMDB, there are actually credited cast members with character names like 'Surf Rat,' 'Freight Train,' 'Fiberglass' (!?!?) 'Psycho-Stick,' and 'Passion for Slashin.'
16. Johnny Utah: "Vaya con dios," perhaps the single goofiest kiss-off line to a villain in film history.
17. Johnny Utah skydives... without a parachute.
18. Keanu falls to the ground, rolls about and screams his incoherent rage up to the sky … not once, not twice, but in THREE different scenes!
19. Ben Harp: "Special agent Utah! This is not some job, flipping burgers at the local drive-in! Yes! - your surf board bothers me! Yes! - your approach to this whole damn case bothers me! And yes! - YOU BOTHER ME!"
20. Courtesy of the IMDB, Matthew Broderick was originally offered the role of Johnny Utah. Which really would have been an entirely different movie.

John Hughes: Talkin' bout my generation

Raise a glass to John Hughes, who crafted the movies that defined the 1980s for many of us and died suddenly today at just 59. For those of us of a certain age, he was kind of our Coppola or Kubrick, lofty as it might sound. "Sixteen Candles," The Breakfast Club," "Pretty In Pink," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" -- it is hard to imagine surviving being a teenager in the 1980s without Hughes' warm and kind of comforting films, which reassured us that being a teenager was often silly and comic and strange, but ultimately survivable. We were all a bit of geek Anthony Michael Hall, jock Emilio Estevez, freak Ally Sheedy, princess Molly Ringwald, stoner Judd Nelson.

The movies are all kind of old-fashioned and hokey -- in a really good way. They felt genuine, even if they really weren't -- Hughes characters were the way we wanted to be, in the 1980s, smart and funny and ironic and always getting the girl (or boy) in the end. He gave John Candy his best role in the buddy pic "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," and I honestly don't think Matthew Broderick has ever topped "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." And "Pretty In Pink" stands out as one of the first movies I ever saw with an actual (gulp) girl, and I can't listen to songs like "If You Leave" without having that lovelorn 15-year-old geek in me clench up the heartstrings a bit.

Hughes wasn't a master filmmaker - I loathe the gimmicky "Home Alone" movies he did - but he managed to tap into the zeitgeist, I think. Hughes just sort of faded away by the 1990s, more or less retiring and becoming a bit of a recluse with only a handful of movies like the mediocre "Flubber" and "Drillbit Taylor" to his credit; the last movie he actually directed was 1991's lame "Curly Sue." His very best films were the ones he was a director as well as a writer on, so it's a shame he never really returned to the game. But maybe he said all he had to say with his run of a half-dozen comedies in the 1980s.

Either way, RIP, Mr. Hughes -- your movies helped shape an awful lot of our lives in the ages of acid-wash jeans, hair spray and cassingles. It's a terrible cliche, but we won't forget about you.

Michael Jackson redux, robots and Oscars

• Michael Jackson, part 2: It's hard to explain, for those who weren't impressionable teens in the 1980s, how utterly everywhere MJ was there for a few years. "Thriller" was in the air, inescapable, in a way that pop music doesn't quite penetrate these multimedia days. I couldn't hum a Kanye West song today to save my life, but in 1983 my brother owned a red Jackson zipper jacket, the cassette of "Thriller" was played every time more than two people got together in a room, and everyone had to try to moonwalk at least once. Nobody these days has an album that stays at #1 for weeks, months. Even parents knew the songs. Even if I really liked Men At Work and Prince a bit more, MJ was in the air, always.

What was interesting was the reaction in the newsroom Friday – one journo, when I told him the first reports came over the wire that Jackson was hospitalized, reacted with "Good. I hope he's dead." A few people gasped when news of the death came out but they were all 30somethings like me. Another in his 20s couldn't see what the big deal was. Journos are a hard-bitten cynical lot so the jokes started circulating almost immediately too. The few folks who actually seemed shaken up by the news were kind of laughed off. Again, as I said Friday, I'm by no measure a huge Jackson fan, but I can't ignore the impact he made on my and everyone's lives, just through the strange and singular story of his existence. Of course we're all well and sick of the Jackson memorial coverage (this is why I get almost all my news from newspapers and online; I can't stand television's incessant need to babble and fill the airtime with vapor), but in the end, you can't deny the sudden death of the creator of the best-selling album of all time is news.

• TEN nominees for Best Picture? No, I don't quite get what the Academy of Motion Pictures is thinking by doubling the nominees for best picture starting next year. Six, sure, maybe eight I could see, but this just seems like a shameless grab for ego, ratings and dollars rather than any sense of the Oscars actually failing to reward the finest in film. I don't think you're suddenly going to start seeing more obscure indie movies nominated. They saw "The Dark Knight" make zillions, realized they didn't nominate it and the Oscars had lousy viewers.

• No, I don't plan on seeing "Transformers 2" any time soon. I did see the first one and I guess I liked it OK at the time although I've never felt any need to watch it again. It's a shame to hear this one relies on a lot of crude and bawdy humor, as it'd be nice if they made a movie my Transformer-obsessed 5-year-old could watch. But it's great fun reading the eviscerating reviews this one is getting – the New York Times gets the word "cretinous" in the very first sentence, while Roger Ebert has a marvelous essay contrasting the "painful" movie to other far better robots in film. I agree one of the more irritating things about director Michael Bay's design is its sheer frenzy; I can barely tell where these robots' faces are supposed to be. Another reviewer's quote which perhaps is a wee bit over the top: "It represents every single vile, puny thing that's wrong with the United States." Worse than "Paul Blart: Mall Cop"?

Michael Jackson 1958-2009

Good god, what a morning to work in a newsroom. There was a lot of last-minute shuffling, rearranging and shock as there is only when the biggest news stories happen. There is no charge like it and despite my occasional grumblings about the state of journalism in 2009, it's a hell of a place to be when big things drop. Michael Jackson is one of those stories, and while we'll all get well and truly sick of the endless tributes, analyses and blathering over the coming days, his sudden death is an event, capital "E."

I'm still processing the fact of Jacko's sudden death -- but my first instinct is to call it a tragedy in the big old broad Shakespearean sense. He may have been a freaky creep, and I can't say I was a gigantic fan, but he was a creature warped and created by many others, by greed and by abuse and in the end I can't help but feel a little sorry for the guy, who hadn't really had the chance of a normal life since his bullying dad heard him sing for the first time. Like Elvis, who he will be compared to a lot, he was chewed up, and weak, and was no innocent, but his story is still a sad and all-too-common one. He mutated long ago into a carnival freak, and while the actual death is a shock, can anyone say they really expected this eternal boy to make it to his 60s and 70s?

Like pretty much any pre-teen in 1982, I listened to "Thriller" a heck of a lot, and have to admit that even now when I hear the familiar thump-thump of "Billie Jean" or the unfaltering drive of "Beat It," it gets my pulse up a bit. Jackson's early chipmunk-voiced boy rock didn't do much for me, and around the time of "Bad" he fell victim to believing he was some kind of twisted messiah, but "Thriller" -- well, despite all that's happened since there is a reason it sold a bazillion copies. For someone with such a big, universal voice and sound once upon a time, it's sad to see him ending so very small.

Return of the Visitors, Jay Bennett and The Hobbit

Winter has clenched its icy fingers around Aotearoa this last week or so and I am cold. Brr.

• I had kind of vaguely heard they were remaking the old "V" TV series from the 1980s, but hadn't realised it was actually really happening until I saw this trailer for it. "V" was a great '80s nostalgia kick for me -- I remember being horrified out of my wits by the original miniseries and its sequel, despite the cheesy special effects and some rather dire acting. Still, you had Marc "I Am The Beastmaster" Singer, Michael "I Will Kill You My Pinky Finger" Ironside and Jane Badler, who didn't look half bad in a red Nazi-symbolic jumpsuit. And the metaphors, ham-handed as they were, mean the show holds up decently well today. (The ongoing TV series was less good, but I was hooked on it even as it descended into silliness and makeup so cheap that even a 13-year-old noted it.) Anyway, this new series looks fairly promising, certainly better special effects, although I wonder how much "new" it will bring to the table. Will it just repeat the original or will it be a radical re-invention like "Battlestar Galactica"? I quite like Elizabeth Mitchell from "Lost" and am pleased to see her on the cast. Hopefully we'll see it in New Zealand by 2012 or so.

• Rest in peace, Ex-Wilco member Jay Bennett. Bennett contributed a heck of a lot to the distinctive psychedelic quasi-country sound of the band's "Being There" and "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" albums, and his death at just 45 is pretty shocking. The headstrong Bennett clashed a lot with Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy, as recounted in the excellent documentary "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart," and it sounds like he had a lot of personal issues consuming his life after he left the band in 2001. Wilco has continued to prosper and impress, but I'm sad Bennett never quite broke through as a solo artist.

• Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is going all New Zealand as he gets ready to film 2011's "Hobbit" prequels to "Lord of the Rings." I can't wait for these -- if Peter Jackson couldn't do it, I can imagine no other director than the singularly mysterious del Toro to take his place.

John Updike, 1932-2009

John Updike is dead, and I think today the title of America's greatest living writer is vacant.

I first discovered Updike right around my freshman year in college, when I tackled his "Rabbit" novels one after another, chewing them down like the best meal you ever had. Probably it was around then that I really started to realize that I wouldn't mind spending a great deal of my life ahead reading books like this, that "literary" books, the fancy kind you usually read for school rather than for fun, could transform you a bit. The "Rabbit" series follows the life of one Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, former basketball star, from young and married to aging and retired over four utterly amazing books, one for each decade from the 50s to the 80s. Every five years or so, I take these books down from the shelf and read them again, because I've discovered that the older I get the more I discovered about Updike.

I wrote a lengthy term paper on one of my favorite of his books, the underappreciated "Memories of the Ford Administration," the research for which was like taking a bath in Updike. I wandered around the thickets of his sentences, casting about for clues that fit my thesis. And during college, I read a lot of Updike -- the fine short story collections, each piece a honed little diamond, the dense novels, the constantly curious and questing non-fiction. As he aged he began to branch out into material like quasi science-fiction ("Toward the End of Time") and Shakespearean riffs ("Gertrude and Claudius"). Always, a keen intelligence animated his work. When I first read Updike, I constantly got the feeling of being stunned about how one man could know so much, have so many words in him.

His style might have started to seem poky and antique to some - sex and infidelity continued to be big themes for him long into the age of the Internet - but even in his less remarkable works I'd always find dozens of sentences that filled me with amazement. He managed to be both ethereal and crude, writing with equal passion about everything from death to used cars to masturbation. He saw fine lines everywhere.

My father-and-law and I were just talking about him the other day, and I loaned him a copy of Updike's remarkable memoir "Self Consciousness" to read. Such was his remarkable prolificness that I could never quite keep up with Updike's output -- there's probably still a dozen of his 50+ books I haven't read. Plenty of company to keep in the years ahead when no more books are forthcoming.

Goodbye, Mr Updike, and thanks for the words. From "Rabbit Run":

"His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs."

Polish posters, presidential debates and R.I.P. David Foster Wallace

Random notes for a random Wednesday:

• I like cool movie posters. I like the Polish people. Thus, this awesome website featuring 50 Incredible Film Posters From Poland is well worth my and your time. Amazing re-inventions of some of the most famous movies of all time in crazily cool expressionist art that's kind of like Ralph Steadman meets Salvador Dali. Go look and gasp. The one at right? Cuddly robot comedy sequel Short Circuit 2. Holy moses.

• Rest in peace, author David Foster Wallace, who apparently committed suicide last week. He kind of went from "next big literary thing" in the mid-1990s to a "whatever happened to," which is quite sad, but I found him a tremendously gifted journalist and nonfiction writer. Reading his collection "Consider The Lobster And Other Essays" a year or two back I thought it was pretty fascinating, microscopically detailed looks at all the errata of modern life, from lobsters to porn to dictionaries. Wallace was a writer who loved to play games with the form, using footnotes, flow charts and more; a regret of mine is that I tried reading his massive novel "Infinite Jest" many years back and just couldn't get through the 1,000-plus page monster which now stands as his biggest epitaph. I hope to try it again one day, and it's said to know whatever demons drove Wallace means we'll never see what he might have done next.

• The presidential debates are coming up, and in what I think is rather a cool development, the very first one is being held at my alma mater, the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Not often that Oxford gets to be the center of the Media Universe these days but for one night, it will be. Intentional or not, an interesting symbolic pick with the first black presidential nominee at a school that has its own very large place in racial history. What I wouldn't give to be working at my old paper for that one day! Here's a cool article about the preparations for it.

Entirely random rainy Sunday-morning thoughts

...Well, what a lousy week THAT was for our wallet. In addition to it turning out we needed a new hot water cylinder as part of the whole Bathroom Disaster 2008 epic, this was the week our stumpy little 1996 Subaru decided to get most of its engine rebuilt (new timing belt, et cetera) to the tune of four digits of funds. Egad. When it rains it pours. At least we have our health. If not our savings account.

"Just when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it."
I didn't get a chance to write a post in honour of the late, great George Carlin, but most of the rest of the Internet did anyway far better than I could have. I always loved Carlin's grouchy, no-bullshit presence, even if I realize I never did see quite as much of his stand-up material as I've always meant to. Sadly, now is the time to catch up. Also: 101 great George Carlin lines. You just have to imagine his wonderfully surly voice saying them now.
"I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately."

One thing that cheered me up mightily this week was finally getting my massive copy of Fred Hembeck's monumental Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus, 900-freaking-pages of vintage Hembeck cartoons from the '70s, '80s and beyond. Ever since this was announced last year I've been dying to read it, as I've been a fan of Fred's genial comic-essay toons since I read the old Fantaco books. Fred's like the nicest comic-store owner fanboy you ever met, full of honest love and appreciation for the medium, and it's fantastic to see this big ol' book, even if some of the lettering is a wee bit microscopic. His animated histories, pans and praises now look like some kind of witty ancestor of the comics blogosphere. I'm still amazed that I'm actually kinda-sorta an acquaintance-pal of Fred these days through the Internets, and he very kindly sent me a whole ton of Beatles covers CDs a couple years back. Whatta guy, that Hembeck. Bring on Volume 2!

...It's raining AGAIN. July in New Zealand is the winter of our discontent.

In tribute: The manly art of Charlton Heston

...So did I mention I was going on a week's vacation?

More on that soon (we had a nifty camping trip down into the southwesterly reaches of North Island), but I had to break my blog-silence for a minute to offer an appreciation for the late Charlton Heston, that manly man's actor -- a brute force who I disagreed with in almost every fashion politically, but whom I still grew up admiring as the clench-jawed hero of "Planet of the Apes," "Soylent Green," "Omega Man" and more. Heston was stone-cold awesome to me at the tender age of 12 or 13, when I first caught the "Planet of the Apes" series in an afternoon movie marathon. ("Beneath the Planet of the Apes," although nearly Heston-free, scared the bejeezus out of me and was the most nihilistic "G"-rated movie I've ever seen -- Dr. K will educate you further.) His earlier work wasn't quite as interesting to me (I've still never seen "Ben Hur"), but Charlton Heston - Mexican detective! in Orson Welles' grand 1958 "Touch of Evil" remains one of my favorite Heston roles.

But it was the first "Planet of the Apes" where we had maximum Heston, bare-chested, growling ("get your hands off me you damn dirty ape!") and at sky-high testosterone levels. I'd easily plop that first "Apes" movie in my all-time top 10 -- it's inventive, satirical and strangely resonant 40 years on. Scared the heck of out of me as a whippersnapper, and still gets to me (the 2001 remake, despite some awesome makeup, is a pale shadow of the original). Heston's cynical, often cruelly arrogant Taylor, is mankind's representative in the world of the Apes - rude and tough, but also human to the core. We identified with him, as he navigated a strange and awful world that -- it turns out -- mankind made in its own war and hatred. Heston's presence somehow made a movie that might've been a silly joke into something that rang real.

Anyway. Heston starred in a blue ton of movies as well as "Apes," and brought a steel-eyed, brutish charisma to many of them. What folks don't recall now is that he was a big supporter of the Rev. Martin Luther King, and of civil rights, at a time when it was impolitic to be so. Later, he became the right-wing president of the National Rifle Association, and that's when many of us Heston fans dropped out -- sorry Chuck, guns never did much for me.

But I felt a pang of sorrow when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's several years back -- sorry, whatever your politics, nobody deserves that -- and when they announced his death tonight, I realized that the invincible alpha-male hero at the center of so many of my primeval teen movie experiences was gone, even though Heston seemed as eternal as the tides, as ever-lasting as the stone the Statue of Liberty itself was made of. Godspeed, Chuck. We didn't agree often, but heck, you haunted my dreams as an actor, and that's the ultimate accolade for any of your creed.

30 Days of Bloggery: Heath Ledger 1979-2008

Wow. Some celebrity deaths you expect -- Britney, anyone? -- some you don't. I was an admirer of Heath Ledger the actor, and his sudden death at only 28 is a real stunner. While his early teen movies didn't do a lot for me, with "Brokeback Mountain" and his astounding, Academy-Award nominated turn I saw a human chameleon with a ton of talent. Still hard to watch the final scene of that movie, and I felt like he took a role that could've been a punchline - a gay cowboy? - and turned it into something hauntingly real.

Two of his final performances I had been really looking forward to - his turn as an aspect of Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There" (which disgracefully has yet to open down here), and of course, his Joker in "The Dark Knight" next summer. Casting Ledger as the Joker surely raised a few eyebrows, but his highly creepy performance in the trailer chased away all doubts. It's terrible to think now this will be his obituary rather than the next chapter in a promising career. What a waste of talent.

I just finished reading the sordidly entertaining "Please Kill Me," a history of punk rock, which had the sad subtext of an extraordinary list of drug casualties, screwed-up and spoiled lives. Having immersed myself in druggy demises, seeing yet another likely one just feels crueler than it ought to. I feel for his family, and his fans, and wish whatever happened that led to his sad end in a New York room didn't go down like that.

30 Days of Bloggery: The greatest New Zealander

More than a week of mass national mourning ended today as Sir Edmund Hillary was laid to rest, and for an hour or two this morning, much of the country just kind of stopped to watch one of New Zealand's biggest funerals, and paid tribute to the man who's been dubbed "the greatest New Zealander."

Was he? Well, time will truly tell, but there has been remarkably little argument about it down here for now, it feels like. Imagine that in other countries – is there one man that comes to mind as "the greatest American," or "greatest Brit", with little argument? Hillary was a remarkable soul, and while there's been the typical amount of hyperbole one gets when someone this famed dies – let's rename mountains after him! let's declare a national holiday! (all ideas he would've hated from most accounts) – there's also been a fair amount of soul-searching as to what being a Kiwi means.

What's struck me the most in all the reams of Hillary tributes and essays is that his true measure came not so much from climbing Mount Everest, but perhaps even more from what he did after it – continued explorations, but more importantly, he devoted the rest of his life to improving the remote Sherpa communities of Nepal that he so grew to love. Even after his first wife and daughter were killed in a plane crash there in the 1970s, "Sir Ed" didn't give up on Nepal -- he simply, quietly, worked to build hospitals, create schools, and improve lives in a generally non-imperialist, refreshingly humble kind of way. As they say down here, "good on yer mate." It's hard to imagine another figure who "cashed in" on his fame in such a generous way.

30 Days of Bloggery: Sir Edmund Hillary 1919-2008

"It is not the mountains that we conquer, but ourselves." - Sir Edmund Hillary

New Zealand's biggest mountain crumbled today. Sir Edmund Hillary was the most famous New Zealander in the world, the first man to climb Mount Everest, a world-class explorer and gentleman and as almost any kiwi will tell you, "a first-class bloke." He was 88 years old, but still, it kind of seemed like he'd live forever. Besides climbing Everest with Tenzing Norgay, Hillary also traveled to the North and South Poles. His last trip to Antarctica was last year - at 87 years old.

While the world mourns him, in New Zealand, Hillary was an absolute icon. Hillary's place in NZ society is pretty unique -- when his death was announced today, a spontaneous gasp erupted among the hardened, cynical newsroom. He was above politics, a national hero of a kind I'm hard-pressed to compare to in America. He's on the five-dollar bill, for crying out loud. A state funeral is pending, of course.

The thing about Hillary is his essential kiwi nature - self-effacing yet not insecure, proud yet not too boastful. In him, we all -- native New Zealanders and newcomers alike -- we saw what we wanted to be. He was that rare fellow few people could say anything bad about -- more than 50 pages of memorials to him from all over the world to him right now on the NZ Herald web site.

"We knocked the bastard off." - Sir Edmund Hillary, 1953.

That he did. That he did.

Life totally sucks sometimes department

Sad, sad and shocking news to learn comics artist Mike Wieringo died suddenly of a heart attack yesterday at only 44 years old. "Ringo" was one of my favorite current comics artists, a prolific blogger and by all accounts one of the nicest guys in the biz. His runs on "Fantastic Four," "The Flash," "Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" and most recently the great little "Spider-Man/Fantastic Four" series with Jeff Parker were old-school comics fun at their best - I loved his rubbery, expressive and clean style, which could manage dark when it was called for but was best at creating a sense of wonder and adventure. What a terrible piece of news to wake up to and my condolences to his family. RIP.